TELEVISION : War-Torn Woody : ‘Cheers’ ’ resident yokel was buffeted by a storm of criticism for condemning Bush’s Persian Gulf policy, but his activism hasn’t harmed his career

The literal-minded Woody Boyd probably wouldn’t have understood. If “Cheers’ ” resident yokel had glimpsed the words Desert Storm in a newspaper lying around TV’s most famous bar, it’s likely he would have sneered at the suggestion that apple pie and hot fudge sundaes could fall like rain from the sky.

But the liberal-minded Woody Harrelson, who has played the naive bartender for the last six years, understood all too well. Bombs, not bonbons, were falling from the Middle Eastern sky. And while most Hollywood activists, scared off by polls that showed the vast majority of Americans approved of President Bush’s Persian Gulf policy, sat out the war or cheered on the troops, Harrelson stood up and excoriated his President and his country for “initiating a war simply to bolster the oil companies, the weapons industry and a presidency that was at the time sagging under the weight of a savings & loan catastrophe and a deteriorating economy.”

In a town where image is everything, where public perception can make or break a lucrative career, Harrelson’s outspokenness was risky business.

There he was each Thursday night on NBC playing the lovable country bumpkin on TV’s most popular show and raking in enough dough to afford a gorgeous Malibu home just down the beach from Johnny Carson and John McEnroe. Zap the remote control, and there he was on CNN, clapping hands and chanting anti-government slogans with a group of peace activists who, in the minds of many, were scandalously unpatriotic, or worse yet, the enemy themselves.

“A lot of people,” Harrelson admits, thought he was foolhardy. People close to him in the entertainment business, people who had nothing to do with the business, even people he didn’t know, warned him: “Don’t do it, Woody. You’re making a big mistake.”

How big?

Harrelson says that Miller Beer dropped its negotiations with him to star in the company’s TV commercials. The Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans reneged on its invitation for Harrelson to serve as grand marshal, replacing him with military men. On a radio talk show, callers battered Harrelson with “love-it-or-leave-it” dogma. One person suggested that he move to Cuba. About a dozen “Cheers” fans, Harrelson says, wrote him nasty letters declaring that they would never again watch their favorite sitcom.

“But I made a decision early on that if this costs me my career, fine,” Harrelson says, some six months after he first spoke out against the war. “This was something I felt so passionately about, it was so important, I felt committed to it in such a way that all else didn’t matter. My career didn’t matter.”

The war’s over now, and Harrelson’s still lashing out against it, citing statistics of mounting casualties and epidemics among Kurdish and Iraqi children, citing the failure of the war to achieve peace, democracy or an end to the proliferation of weapons among the countries in the Middle East. He’s especially lashing out against the country’s lack of an energy policy, which since the war, he says, has permitted the Bush Administration and the oil companies to rationalize that to avoid dependency on unreliable foreign oil sources like Saddam Hussein, drilling off the coast of California and in the Alaska wildlife refuge is essential. Even the nuclear power industry, Harrelson laments, is using that same argument to resurrect itself.

And what has his activism cost? Not much. Harrelson, who just turned 30, is still on TV. “Cheers” was the most popular show on television last season, and Harrelson recently received his fifth consecutive Emmy nomination as best supporting actor (he has won once). Last spring, James L. Brooks nabbed him to star on stage opposite Glenn Close and Laura Dern in the standing-room-only “Brooklyn Laundry.” Harrelson and Close--an off-screen couple, according to the Hollywood media even though they have not owned up to it publicly--intend to star together in “Soul Survivors,” a big-screen outlaw love story in development at Warner Brothers. Harrelson currently can be seen on movie screens nationwide in his first significant film role, Michael J. Fox’s wise-cracking rival in “Doc Hollywood.” He’s been spending his summer vacation from “Cheers” portraying the title character in “White Men Can’t Jump,” a playground basketball movie written and directed by “Bull Durham’s” Ron Shelton. And he’s still neighbors with Carson and McEnroe.

What gives?

“The bottom line is he is very funny, very lovable, and people really identify with him as a sort of everyman,” said Michael J. Fox. “There is no political blacklist in Hollywood today, and the public has the capacity to separate entertainment from politics. It’s like when Roseanne Barr was ripped apart after she sang the national anthem, and the next week, her show was No. 1.” (Well, not the next week, actually, but it did return to the top of the pack.)

“All actors win or lose on their own merits,” said Ted Danson, an outspoken environmentalist and star of “Cheers.” “Lord knows this town will use anyone who is hot. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as your movie makes money. It would be a nice excuse for some of us to say, ‘Gee I could have been somebody if it wasn’t for my politics.’ But that’s just not true.”

Which is not to say that the uproar last January didn’t sting. While his career wasn’t damaged, Harrelson was hurt by the idea that simply speaking his heartfelt opinions against a rush to the “macabre nightmare” of war could disqualify him from appearing in a parade.

But Danson, who was working on the “Cheers” set the week Harrelson’s peace activism commenced, added that the attacks only fortified Harrelson’s resolve. Generally a free-spirited, practical joker at work, Harrelson was sober and studious during this period, Danson said.

“It was a terribly emotional time for everyone and people did not want to hear the emotional voice, which is why all information we got on television was very lawyerly and analytical,” Danson said. “When you heard the emotional, humanistic pleas of someone like Woody, it slammed right up against the anger and violence and confusion everyone was feeling. And it was quite remarkable for him to be loved unanimously one day and have all these angry voices shouting at him the next. That’s quite a thing to live with. But Woody did not back off. He jumped into it wholeheartedly, and as a result he became far more thoughtful, far more committed and far more eloquent about his message.”

Harrelson is still eager to discuss his anti-war sentiments, preferring that to yet another interview about his career. He holds court inside the American Indian tepee he recently erected on his lush Malibu lawn. In the center of the tepee are two enormous crystals. A guitar sits at his side.

When asked if he might be better off letting his anti-militarism fade with the public’s memory of the war and sticking to less controversial issues such as advising kids to stay off drugs, Harrelson says forget it. Shortly after his initial appearance at the anti-war protest last January, Harrelson embarked on a speaking tour of about a dozen colleges, loosening up his audiences with jokes and then letting them have it about “the oil companies and the military machine.” He’s planning a similar tour as soon as he finds a break in his acting schedule.

One problem with the tour, however, was that while his jokes disarmed some, many in his audience jeered him when he began to denounce the war. Music, he hopes, will help him avoid such confrontations without compromising his message. An unabashed performer, he picks up his guitar and begins to play one of his songs. His voice is no threat to Van Morrison, but Harrelson is into his Word.

In the midst of this song about lying politicians and our misplaced reverence of technology, he sings:

And we’re drinking bottled water ,

We’ll soon be drinking bottled air ,

And the Amazon is burning, we send money ‘cause we care ,

And we march toward self-destruction

Like lemmings toward the sea ,

And the war machine is growing to preserve democracy.

Harrelson wasn’t always political. For much of his six years in Hollywood, he lived recklessly, partying late into most nights, driving fast cars, provoking bar fights and seducing women by the score. A recent cover story in GQ magazine focusing on his testosterone-induced high jinks began: “He’s got the lovable yokel act down, but in real life Woody Harrelson is the slick prince of El Lay,” a not so subtle play on his well-chronicled sexual escapades.

“Not so long ago, I was in a hedonistic bent in my life. I was really into self-aggrandizement,” Harrelson said. “I was really into becoming really rich and really famous, and I thought, ‘Yeah, when I get there, then I’ll worry about doing something because then I’ll really have the clout to do something.’ But what kind of mentality is that?”

Harrelson only had to look across TV’s most beloved bar for a role model. Danson, “Cheers’ ” rich and famous centerpiece, is no Hollywood hedonist. Danson is an environmentalist. He founded the American Oceans Campaign, a group dedicated to preserving the world’s waterways from pollution and oil spills. He donates and raises money for his cause, he lobbies Congress, he uses his celebrity to push his environmental agenda.

Harrelson began to give of his money. Then one day, Danson was sick, and Harrelson pinch hit for him at an American Oceans press conference. After that, he began speaking out more and more, all the while indulging his hedonistic lifestyle on the side.

“So I was out there doing stuff, but I realized that I needed to get my own house in order,” Harrelson said. “I couldn’t be preaching to students the blessings of a fuel-efficient car and driving a Corvette. I couldn’t be violent in my own life, if I was against the violence of war. So I’ve been spending more time talking my talk and being more conservative and less frivolous with my time and energy.”

Part of that is trying to dump his search for self-worth in wine, women and fame and surrounding himself instead with the tepee, the crystals, a trip to Machu Picchu--what he calls “the trappings of spirituality.” Part of that is dumping the gas-guzzling Corvette for a BMW motorcycle.

“Woody is the kind of guy who always leaves you shaking your head,” Fox said. “Like I’ll call him up to ask, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ and he’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m going to Peru to climb a mountain and hold a crystal up to the moon in hopes of getting zapped with something.’ He’s completely stream of consciousness, completely spontaneous, which is what makes him such an interesting actor and such an interesting person. And he’s completely sincere, absolutely, and a guy who always puts his heart where his mouth is.”

But the contradictions inherent in being a wealthy TV star stumping for the poor and the downtrodden--”a limousine liberal,” Harrelson says with a chuckle--are not lost on him. This is a man who was doing Yoga on his lawn as his publicist arrived brandishing a copy of him in a $1,500 suit on the cover of GQ. This is a man who prides himself on his intelligence and peppers his conversation with words that the simple-minded Woody on “Cheers” could not even pronounce, much less understand, yet is prejudged by many as a dummy because his TV character is dumb.

Danson acknowledged the problem of the celebrity activist: “I was on the Larry King show because I was going to testify to Congress about energy policy, and this guy called up questioning my credentials. So I answered as best I could and then they showed a clip of me as Sam Malone. To the world I am Sam, and why would Sam be going before Congress?

“But I think as actors we are messengers, not necessarily policy-setters. The way the news is set up, it’s very celebrity-driven. So I think it’s important for actors, if they have the microphone, to become the messengers. Now you don’t have to believe us. If you don’t like that we’re actors, find a voice you do like and get involved. But to ignore the message just because you don’t like us, I think that’s foolish.”

Harrelson doesn’t have any concrete answers about what he calls these many “paradoxes.” He jokes that the only thing keeping him from donating all of his money to underpaid teachers is the wrath of his business manager. But since he is blessed with celebrity, he, like Danson, is determined to use it even if some dismiss him as just some rich actor. Resorting to the poet in him, he justifies his message with a story about the day his next-door neighbor hacked the branches off the trees in his yard.

“I asked the guy, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘Hey, it’s not your property.’ And I said, ‘I know that, but what about the tree?’ And he said, ‘If it falls in your yard, I’ll come over and pick it up.’ Again the issue of property. And I said, ‘Fine, but what about the tree?’ You can go round and round about celebrities not being experts and maybe it is absurd for me to be talking about something as important as war and peace, but the point is: What about the damn tree? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying because of the disease and destruction caused by our bombing in Iraq? That is the issue. That’s what I’m going to talk about.”

As the jubilation over the war recedes, with a recent Times poll indicating that 61% of Americans believed that the war either had no effect or worsened the stability of the Middle East, Harrelson says that he feels vindicated. The fallout, he claims, has been positive, his sudden “infamy” actually expediting his ability to expand the public’s perception beyond his TV image.

Harrelson is still wary of stretching his image too far, at least in terms of his acting. His part in “Doc Hollywood” has been described as little more than “Woody Boyd with a mean streak,” and he insists that he still won’t play a hatchet murderer because the public just isn’t ready for “Woody the Executioner.”

Still, the transformation has begun. “Cheers,” he says, is about to begin its 10th and probably final season. After that, Harrelson vows, he will continue to try to influence the world through his music and public speaking, while continuing to stretch the public image of himself so that he can eventually deliver his message through his movies.

“As an actor, there is nothing like theater to really energize you,” Harrelson says. “But movies, I realize now, are important because they really can change people, change the way they think about things. Kevin Costner understands that. ‘Dances With Wolves’ was a significant piece of work. That to me is what movies can and should be. And I know I’m not anywhere near Kevin Costner, but if I can ever attain some sort of stature in this business where I can dictate what kind of movies I make, that’s the kind of movie I’m going to do.”