Woody Harrelson Calls For Movie Studios To Drop 'Absurd' COVID Protocols

Film sets continue to enforce Covid protocols, including vaccine and mask mandates, three years later.

Actor Woody Harrelson is calling on the studios to undo these restrictions immediately. He worries such enforcement could derail the future of indie films, calling remaining protocols "absurd."

“What’s absurd about the Covid protocols?” The New York Times pushed back at the actor during an interview.

“The fact that they’re still going on!” Harrelson responded.

He could have ended it there. Mic drop.

But he continued. And with receipts:

"I don’t think that anybody should have the right to demand that you’re forced to do the testing, forced to wear the mask and forced to get vaccinated three years on. I’m just like, let’s be done with this nonsense. It’s not fair to the crews. I don’t have to wear the mask. Why should they? Why should they have to be vaccinated? How’s that not up to the individual? I shouldn’t be talking about this .”

Adding, “It makes me angry for the crew. The anarchist part of me, I don’t feel that we should have forced testing, forced masking and forced vaccination. That’s not a free country. Really I’m talking about the crew. Because I can get out of wearing a mask. I can test less. I’m not in the same position they’re in, but it’s wrong. It’s three years. Stop."

GIFFONI VALLE PIANA, ITALY - JULY 20: Woody Harrelson attends Giffoni Film Festival 2019 on July 20, 2019 in Giffoni Valle Piana, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

Moreover, Covid protocols continue to prove inefficient.

Ironically, it was The New York Times itself that changed course late last month. The outlet published a story confirming that "mask mandates did nothing."

In The Times' own words:

These observations don’t come from just anywhere. Jefferson and 11 colleagues conducted the study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data. The conclusions were based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries. And they track what has been widely observed in the United States: States with mask mandates fared no better against Covid than those without.

And yet such protocols remain.

Harrelson raised similar concerns in his monologue on "SNL" last week, railing against Covid response -- from mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns.

As well as Big Pharma:

“So the movie goes like this: The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.”

That is so well said. Accurate and undoubtedly frightening.

Harrelson is currently on a press tour for “Champions," the new indie sports film in which he stars.

Ultimately, Woody Harrelson's future in the film is as much of a question as the trajectory of indie films.

Hollywood overlords certainly won't brush off a prominent actor spewing such inconvenient truths about the Covid response -- protocols the film industry upheld.