Reportedly, Woody Harrelson has signed on to play Timothy Leary in an adaptation of The Most Dangerous Man in America. No network is attached yet, but with the well-known source material and a big star, it seems likely to happen. Vice tells more.
For those who don’t know Leary, here is the quick: he was a Harvard psychology professor who co-led the ethically problematic Harvard Psilocybin Project with Richard Albert (who later became self-help guru Ram Dass). Both Leary and Alpert were fired from Harvard and Leary went on to live an orgiastic debaucherous lifestyle in a Massachusetts mansion, in Mexico, the Bay Area and jail. He was famously sexist and homophobic, he coined the phrases “set and setting” and “tune in and drop out”, he was a psychedelic evangelist to the 10th degree and his ego-fueled cultural stardom is retrospectively considered a significant factor in the federal scheduling of LSD and henceforth a roadblock in the legal approval road of contemporary psychedelic research.