Woody Harrelson says he had to find a way to play against his own politics for his character in HBO‘s new Watergate thriller, White House Plumbers.
Harrelson stars as E. Howard Hunt in the series, who was one of the men who was sent to jail for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Justin Theroux joins him as his accomplice G. Gordon Liddy, while Lena Headey plays Hunt’s wife, Dorothy.
While the story of Watergate has been told in countless iterations over the decades, White House Plumbers is a satirical political thriller, making it one of the few comedies about the incident that rocked Washington, D.C., in the 1970s. The Watergate scandal proved to be the downfall of President Richard Nixon, who was found to have approved plans for a cover-up after five men broke into the offices of the Democratic Party, where they tapped phones and stole documents.
E. Howard Hunt was an officer in the CIA, who later was appointed to the President’s Special Investigations Unit under Nixon, to whom he was passionately loyal. Newsweek asked Harrelson how it felt to play a character so drastically opposed to his own politics.
“Yeah, I’m much more Marxist than a fascist. So yeah, I do feel a big distance a big gap,” Harrelson told Newsweek. “One area where I connected with Hunt was in his relation to his family…I understand the concept of being away too much from your family because you go off and work. I couldn’t really relate to ‘send me Che Guevara’s hands in a box’ type of mentality, but I understood the family dynamic.”
Theroux had a similar task in playing the eccentric G. Gordon Liddy, who together with Hunt orchestrated the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building.
“Like Woody, I don’t think I have any personal resemblance to G. Gordon Liddy, at least emotionally,” Theroux told Newsweek. “I think that in order to play any character, you kind of have to force yourself to fall in love with them, whether you like him or not, and that was the case with Liddy.”
Theroux says he realized that Liddy’s story is actually a happy one. “It’s hockey sticks for Liddy, his trajectory is just up and up. Even when he goes to prison he’s like ‘this is fantastic, we’re in prison for Nixon.’ He got to be a martyr. So I got to enjoy his optimism. It’s a quality I wish I had in my own life.”
“Liddy was also nuts, and happy to betray his own country for what he thought should be a better country. To each his own I guess,” Theroux added.
