He has continued working consistently in the years since — Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), The Highwaymen (2019), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), and a return to True Detective in 2023’s fourth season — while maintaining the public persona that has developed around his personal commitments: an outspoken advocate for marijuana legalization and industrial hemp, an environmentalist, a vegan, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, a chess enthusiast. He has described himself as an anarchist in political terms, which is a position he has elaborated in interviews over many years to mean a skepticism toward centralized authority and a belief in voluntary cooperation rather than the specific program of political anarchism as a defined movement.
He has also been involved in various public controversies that are separate from his father’s story — statements about COVID-19 vaccines, a 2012 Reddit AMA that he acknowledged went poorly, various political comments — that are part of the public record but that fall outside the central subject of this article.
## The Identity That Exists Beside the Biography
There is a specific thing that happens to people whose biographical circumstances are dramatic enough to become their primary public identity: the circumstances precede them, and the person is then read as an illustration of or commentary on the circumstances. The son of a hitman acts in violent films; the connection is noted and implies more than it should.
Woody Harrelson has navigated this by being, in public terms, so many other things: the Cheers bartender, the basketball hustler, the Oscar-nominated actor, the hemp advocate, the vegan, the jiu-jitsu practitioner, the man who married Neil Simon’s daughter in Tijuana for approximately ten months in 1985 before the marriage effectively ended and who went on to marry Laura Louie, his longtime partner, in Costa Rica in 2008. The accumulated totality of his public self is too large and too varied to be reduced to his father’s crimes, even though his father’s crimes are part of that self.