Michael J Fox’s role in advancing Woody Harrelson’s career

Movie fans may be shocked to know how often a Hollywood career can rise or fall based on the old adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Yes, talent and hard work play the biggest role in any career, but sometimes a star will receive an extra helping hand from an unexpected source. For instance, when Woody Harrelson was trying to transition from TV star to movie actor in the early 1990s, his friendship with old drinking buddy Michael J Fox helped him land one of his breakout roles.

To this day, despite being a three-time Academy Award nominee and star of countless blockbusters, Harrelson will always be Woody Boyd from Cheers to some people. Harrelson played the beloved bartender from 1985 to 1993, starring in a mind-boggling 200 episodes of the seminal sitcom. It made him a bona fide superstar on television, but in those days, TV stars didn’t often make the jump from small to big screen.

In 2017, Harrelson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the divide between film and TV definitely existed, although it wasn’t for a lack of trying on the TV side. He said, “Back then it was just different because people in television were all wanting to do movies, and people in movies didn’t really do television.”

While starring in Cheersthough, Harrelson made a tentative effort to branch out into movies. He made three films: Cool Blue, Doc Hollywoodand Ted & Venus. Two of these movies had little effect on his nascent film career, but he credits one as his “first break in the movies.” That film was Doc Hollywooda romcom starring Michael J Fox, one of the few stars of that period who successfully transitioned from TV (Family Ties) to film (Back to the Future).

Fortunately for Harrelson, Fox was also his buddy, and he really wanted his pal to be in Doc Hollywood. The two young stars had been friends for several years, and Harrelson once revealed he even visited Fox on the Thailand set of Casualties of War in 1989 — two years before Doc Hollywood. During that crazy trip, the pair drank cobra blood mixed with Thai whisky, and it made Fox vomit.

Fox would also reveal in his moving AppleTV+ documentary Still that he felt his first symptoms of the Parkinson’s Disease that would come to shape his life after a boozy night out with Harrelson. With characteristic gallows humour, he revealed that he woke up one morning with a hangover and a twitching pinky finger. He thought, “Had I hit my head? The tape of the previous night’s events was grainy at best. Woody Harrelson was in the bar the night before. Maybe we’d had one of our legendary drunken fights? But I couldn’t recall any such melee.”

Getting back to Doc Hollywoodafter Fox insisted that his friend play the part of Hank Gordon, an insurance salesman in the Podunk town of Grady, South Carolina, it helped Harrelson finally gain a foothold in movies. After that, director Ron Shelton “went to bat” for Harrelson as one of the two leads of White Men Can’t Jumpwhich established him even further. With those two movies under his belt, Harrelson was then able to land 1993’s Indecent Proposal alongside Robert Redford and Demi Moore, and his movie star status was assured.

What would have happened to Harrelson’s career if Fox hadn’t pushed for him to play that supporting part in Doc Hollywood? It’s hard to say, but it’s also impossible to ignore that his buddy did him a real solid on that one.

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