Woody Harrelson vs. Matthew McConaughey
Battle of the Texan Tokers

We all know someone (or of someone) who continues smoking significant quantities of pot well past the age when such behaviour can be excused as the experimentation of youth. Yes, the stoner gone to seed (as it were) is such a common "type" of the post-Boomer generation that there's even one in the Hollywood pantheon. In fact, there are two: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

(Let us take a brief moment here to comment that, of course, we are not among the intimate acquaintances of either Harrelson or McConaughey. We have never witnessed either of them smoking pot. We are not saying that they are chronic consumers of marijuana. We're just saying that they sure act like they are.)

When we first met these two virile young Texans, it wasn't immediately apparent that they might spend a considerable portion of their non-working hours sparking up fatties...or was it? Harrelson's first major screen role was as the sweet, stupid hayseed Woody Boyd on Cheers; perhaps one might have suspected that Woody's seeming naïveté was actually the result of memory loss due to long-term pot use. And while the distinguishing characteristic of McConaughey's David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused was that he hit on girls much younger than he, it's not much of a reach to surmise that a shiftless twentysomething who still thinks his years in high school were the greatest of his life might enjoy a doob as he drives around town in his low-rider.

Both actors have, like many of southern extraction, alternated roles as Atticus Finch-style pillars of the community (Harrelson as architect/cuckold David Murphy in Indecent Proposal, and international journalist Flynn in Welcome to Sarajevo; McConaughey as an idealistic lawyer in A Time to Kill, a doctor in The Wedding Planner, and as a cop in too many movies to list) with roles as Hank Williams Jr.-style rednecks (Harrelson as serial murderer Mickey Knox in Natural Born Killers, pornographer Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt, bowling hustler Ray Munson in Kingpin, and many, many more; McConaughey as saw fodder in The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the aforementioned Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, and Dennis Hopper-esque journeyman dragon killer in this week's Reign of Fire. Then, of course, there was the time McConaughey and Harrelson played redneck hick brothers, in Ed TV). Both have had quite successful careers for a couple of dudes who haven't had a hit between them in several years.

While most Hollywood potheads make some effort to conceal their recreational herb use from the public, neither McConaughey nor Harrelson seems to care very much who knows that they're jokers, smokers, and midnight -- hell, midday tokers. (If they are. And we wouldn't know.) Obviously, Harrelson is making no secret of his love of hemp, since he spends a lot of his time working for its legalization. (Sometimes his candour in this regard comes back to bite him in the ass; when he was arrested in London last month for going nuts and trashing the interior of a cab, most observers commented that he wasn't doing much to improve pot's public profile by losing his shit in a taxi -- plus that's how cokeheads are supposed to act, not potheads!) But McConaughey has raised a few eyebrows in his day, too, and his enthusiasm for pot is common knowledge among celebrity watchers -- sort of like Rosie O'Donnell's homosexuality was before she officially came out earlier this year. Hell, it's been almost three years since he was charged with resisting arrest after police found marijuana in his house (and heaven only knows whether he's ever smoked since then -- or even if he did then, since maybe it wasn't his!); and why had the cops come to his house in the first place? Oh, right -- he was loudly, and nudely, playing the bongos in the middle of the night, alone in his home with another man. But we don't judge.

Dude, there's nothing wrong with being mellow and easygoing. But eventually, these guys are going to have to grow up and stop acting like seventeen-year-olds, right? You know, like Peter Fonda did?

Advantage: Harrelson