Woody Harrelson Once Embarrassed Himself in Front of the Entire Internet
The actor participated in an Ask Me Anything session to promote his movie Rampart, but it backfired spectacularly.
Doing PR campaigns can be a bit overwhelming for an unprepared celebrity, especially in such an uncontrolled environment as Reddit’s Ask Me Anything sessions, aka AMAs, which can lead to some disastrous and truly hilarious results.
Many big-name actors have made fools of themselves during poorly handled AMA sessions, including Morgan Freeman and Jared Leto, but the most infamous Reddit AMA happened in 2011 when Woody Harrelson was promoting his then-recent film Rampart.
Things took a bad turn from the start, as one of the very first questions was whether the actor had intercourse with a girl during her prom at a Los Angeles high school.
For some reason, instead of just ignoring the question, Harrelson answered that it wasn't true and asked Redditors to focus on the movie, which went against the whole "ask anything" thing.
This obviously caused a huge backlash from fans who felt insulted by being used as a marketing tool to promote Rampart.
Some even suggested that the thread be renamed to "Ask Me Anything About Rampart," to which the actor replied that they should ask him about the movie because he "considered his time valuable," and that only added fuel to the fire.
Things got worse when Harrelson ignored most of the questions, only answering 15 of them in the entire 15 minutes of the AMA and blatantly promoting Rampart in most of his answers.
This PR disaster was so big that it even managed to get media coverage outside of Reddit, and Woody Harrelson's face was put on the thumbnail of the r/AMADisasters subreddit, where it still remains 12 years later.
There are two possible reasons for this controversy. First, in one of the replies the actor mentioned that he had just learned about Reddit and was "trying," so perhaps a lack of knowledge about how AMA sessions were supposed to go played a part in this.
Second, it's also possible that Harrelson didn't even write these answers himself, and it's all the result of some incompetent PR agent's work, though there's no substantial evidence to support that claim.
Source: Reddit