Woody Harrelson

Woody Harrelson sits on a blanket near Jackass Peak, watching a bunch of teenagers smear peanut butter and jelly on pita and listening with growing impatience to their unappetizing stories. His pale blue eyes move from one narrator to the next as each waxes eloquent about a head-severing wreck or a face attacked by flesh-eating bacteria. Finally, Harrelson can't restrain himself. "In Central America," the actor says, "they have this insect that burrows into a person's head . . .

Were they to exist, zombies would be hard to ignore. Scripts about these flesh-eating creatures are real, though, and it seems they're easier to push aside. Especially if you're an actor who does his best to ignore such movies. "The one genre I don't watch is horror," says Woody Harrelson. "I get nightmares. For some reason, it really scares me." Just to get the Oscar-nominated actor to read the script to "Zombieland," the title of which could lead any star to believe humans were secondary, was a chore for his agent.

Two soldiers knock on a door. When it opens, they deliver the devastating news no one with a loved one in the military ever wants to hear. This scene plays out time and again in "The Messenger," arriving in Los Angeles on Friday, as the film deals with two soldiers assigned the task of telling next of kin their family member has been killed in the line of duty. The film is also a clear-eyed look at a domestic consequence (and administrative mechanism) of war perhaps previously known only to those with first-hand understanding as well as a vehicle for emotionally resonant performances by Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton.

Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, died of a heart attack at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday. He was 69. Charles Harrelson was found unresponsive in his cell the morning of March 15, said Felicia Ponce, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington, D.C.

Attorneys for Todd McCormick, the medical marijuana activist facing up to 10 years in federal prison for growing thousands of marijuana plants in a rented Bel-Air mansion, were struggling Thursday to set up an international video conference that might free him on a half-million-dollars bail. A spokesman for actor Woody Harrelson, a proponent of the commercial use of hemp, said Harrelson would send a $500,000 check to the U.S.

It may not become another Air Jordan, but a small Oregon-based company plans to market a hiking shoe made of hemp and endorsed by actor and environmental activist Woody Harrelson. Deep E Co. of Portland said Tuesday that its new Headwaters day-hiker, due to hit stores in October, will feature an all-hemp canvas upper and other materials considered environmentally friendly, such as recycled tire rubber and water-based adhesives.

Actor Woody Harrelson will not have to forfeit the $500,000 bond he posted for a cancer patient facing criminal charges for growing more than 4,000 marijuana plants. Nor will Todd McCormick, the 27-year-old defendant, be sent back to jail while he awaits trial in Los Angeles federal court. A bail revocation hearing for McCormick came to an unexpected end Wednesday after federal prosecutors and defense lawyers hammered out a settlement. Under terms of the stipulation, which was approved by U.S.

I'm sitting in a lumpy chair in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, chatting with three Cuban journalists, the shortest of which can't stop asking me if I know Cameron Diaz. I tell him I do not know La Diaz, yet he presses on, certain I am concealing the truth. Every time he says her name, his eyebrows twitch like some half-squashed caterpillar, and the broken-English mantra begins: "I like, heh heh, I like, heh heh, I like. . . .

A week ago, I came upon an article in the Calendar section by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez ("An Accidental Island Tour," March 30). I planned to only skim the article, because the subject matter held little interest for me. To my surprise, Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez's wickedly pointed description of her tour and taxi expedition through Havana with the actor Woody Harrelson, and her experiences with the Cuban people and press, not only engaged me fully, but left...