Woody Harrelson delivered a memorable response after a Northern Irish mother shared a photograph of her nine-month-old daughter and pointed out the baby’s remarkable resemblance to the Hollywood actor.
Dani Grier Mulvenna posted a side-by-side picture of her daughter Cora and Harrelson on Twitter, now X, on August 3, 2022.
Both pictures captured almost identical wide-eyed, open-mouthed smiles – and the resemblance quickly caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people.
“Ok but how does our daughter look like Woody Harreslon,” Mulvenna wrote, accidentally misspelling the actor’s surname in a typo she would only notice after the post had exploded online.
Within two days, the picture had attracted more than 480,000 likes and tens of thousands of shares.
But the reaction that mattered most came from Harrelson himself.
The Zombieland and True Detective star saw the photograph and decided against simply liking it or leaving a short comment.
Instead, he wrote Cora her own poem.
Harrelson reposted the side-by-side photograph to his Instagram account and titled his response “Ode to Cora”.
The short poem read: “You’re an adorable child / Flattered to be compared / You have a wonderful smile / I just wish I had your hair.”
The final line poked fun at Harrelson’s own famously sparse hair while acknowledging one obvious difference between himself and his much younger lookalike.
Mulvenna was stunned that a joke shared from her home in Northern Ireland had travelled far enough to reach one of Hollywood’s best-known actors.
She responded beneath Harrelson’s Instagram post: “You’ve made our day can’t wait to show her this when she’s older, you have another fan for life xxx.”
She also shared his response with her followers, writing: “It’s not every day Woody Harreslon writes your daughter a poem.”
Cora’s father, Kit Grier Mulvenna, was equally impressed by the actor’s willingness to join in with the joke.
Sharing Harrelson’s response, he wrote: “God bless that sweet man.”
The extraordinary exchange had begun with a photograph that Mulvenna apparently never expected to travel much beyond her own followers.
The image placed Cora alongside a laughing Harrelson from his 2009 zombie comedy Zombieland.
The similarity was immediately apparent.
Cora was pictured with her mouth open in a huge grin and her eyes narrowed as she smiled. Harrelson was making an extraordinarily similar expression in the picture selected for the comparison.
Social media users quickly began sharing the image, with many agreeing that Cora looked remarkably like the actor.
Others inevitably began making jokes about Harrelson secretly being related to the youngster, while some tagged the actor in the hope that the photograph might eventually reach him.
It did.
Harrelson, then 61, appeared to take the comparison entirely in his stride.
Rather than being puzzled by finding his face compared with that of a nine-month-old girl thousands of miles away, he turned the viral moment into a personal message Cora’s family could keep.
Mulvenna later made clear that her daughter did not resemble the actor in every photograph.
Sharing another picture of Cora, she joked: “Cora says, thank you all so much for the likes and retweets and also that she doesn’t always look like Woody Harreslon, it’s just that when she does…she really really does xxx.”
The original post became so popular that Mulvenna eventually realised something else had gone wrong: she had repeatedly been spelling Harrelson’s surname incorrectly.
Her phone had apparently autocorrected “Harrelson” to “Harreslon”.
“Oh my god, it took me two days and 445k likes to realise my phone corrected Harrelson to Harreslon,” she wrote.
By then, however, correcting the typo was almost beside the point.
The photograph had already travelled around the world and reached Harrelson.
Mulvenna also joked about some of the increasingly dramatic descriptions of her discovery.
Reacting to one headline describing a woman being shocked after giving birth to a baby resembling Harrelson, she imagined herself in hospital being handed a miniature version of the actor.
“This is my favourite headline so far,” she wrote, joking about being in hospital “with a little Woody Harrelson in a blanket”.
Harrelson’s willingness to embrace the joke was perhaps unsurprising given his reputation for an unconventional sense of humour.
By the time Cora’s picture reached him, the Texas-born actor had spent decades as one of Hollywood’s most recognisable performers.
He first became widely known as bartender Woody Boyd in the television sitcom Cheers, a performance that earned him an Emmy Award.
His film career subsequently produced roles in Natural Born Killers, The People vs Larry Flynt, No Country for Old Men, The Hunger Games franchise, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Zombieland.
He has also received three Academy Award nominations during his career.
Away from the screen, Harrelson is himself the father of three daughters – Deni, Zoe and Makani – with his wife Laura Louie.
That family background added another dimension to his playful response to Cora.
But there was no elaborate celebrity intervention behind the viral moment.
It was simply a mother noticing that her baby happened to be pulling an expression remarkably similar to one made by a famous actor.
The internet did the rest.
The original photograph accumulated close to half a million likes within days, transforming Cora into an unexpected viral star before she was old enough to understand why.
Harrelson’s response then ensured the family came away with something more permanent than a popular social media post.
The story has resurfaced online more than four years later, introducing the unlikely pair of lookalikes to another wave of social media users.
But the original exchange dates back to August 2022, when Cora was just nine months old.
Mulvenna said at the time that she could not wait until her daughter was old enough to understand what had happened.
By then, the viral numbers may mean very little to her.
Having a personalised poem from Woody Harrelson explaining that he was flattered to look like her – and admitting that he envied her hair – may prove rather harder to beat.
