Actor Woody Harrelson has an Emmy win and three Oscar nominations to his name, but he considered becoming a minister, he said on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Then he chose a life of “hedonism” instead, he said.
Harrelson went to school at Hanover College, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, and attended with Vice President Mike Pence.
“I knew him. We were both very religious,” Harrelson said. “It was a Presbyterian College at the time, and I was there on a Presbyterian scholarship, and he was involved with the church activities. … I was actually considering being a minister, and then I just kind of went a different way.”
Kimmel responded to laughter, “Yeah, you did.”
Harrelson and Pence hung out together, too.
“I remember I actually quite liked him. I thought he was a pretty good guy,” Harrelson said. “You know, he’s very religious – very religious, very committed. Seeing how I’m not quite in that ballpark now, I don’t know how we’d get along because I think he’s still quite religious.”
Harrelson added it was the “kind of fervor that you really don’t want, and I don’t want.”
“It was good for me at the time that I started to shift off. I studied theology and I started rethinking … I started seeing how man-made the Bible was – the Nicaean Council there in the church and all that. … I started saying, ‘I could put this whole thing on hold for a while’ … so that I can have a 20s and 30s of extreme hedonism.”
Harrelson said he does “believe there is a God now” but it came from reading Autobiography of Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, who was Hindu.
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Michael Foust is a freelance writer. Visit his website, MichaelFoust.com.
Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Publication date: May 14, 2018
