Billy Bob Thornton thought he’d bring some Texas-style resilience to his lead role on Landman, the latest Western TV saga from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. Then, Texas knocked him down to size. “I remember everybody on the crew saying, ‘Wait ‘till it gets hot down here in Texas,’ and I said, ‘I know. I grew up down here. Don’t worry about it,’” says the former Fargo actor, who was happy not to be shooting in a snowy locale for a change. “I always get stuck in the cold. I’m in Montreal or Toronto or Calgary or Wisconsin. A Simple Plan is the coldest one I ever did. I said, ‘I’ll take the heat any time over the cold.’ Then, the last three weeks we were down there, I was, like, my God, I wish we were shooting in Calgary…”
Landman, debuting on Paramount+ in the fall, stars Thornton as an oil industry crisis manager who solves all manner of life-or-death problems in the unforgiving desert scrubland of west Texas. In this exclusive first look with Vanity Fair, the actor says that shooting the series last summer pushed everyone to the brink.
“There were days when I thought, not only me, but everybody on the crew was going to pass out,” Thornton says. “It was so hot some days, and we’re shooting out at these oil pumpjacks. Do you know what caliche is?” That’s the cement-like powdery soil that blankets the landscape. “We’re on these caliche roads with the rocks in ‘em and stuff, and I’m wearing cowboy boots, and there are scenes where I have to run to the truck. It’s a hundred degrees with a hundred percent humidity. Jesus Christ, I’m in my 60s! This just sucks. My God, there were days when it was pretty hard. This was probably the hardest thing I ever did.”
What makes it worthwhile for a veteran like Thornton is working with Sheridan, whose high-intensity dialogue and indelible characters have gotten A-listers to endure all manner of hardship on shows such as Yellowstone and its spin-offs, 1883 (starring Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Sam Elliott) and 1923 (starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren), as well as stand-alones like Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King, Jeremy Renner’s Mayor of Kingstown, David Oyelowo’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves and Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman’s Special Ops: Lioness.
Landman, which Sheridan adapted from journalist Christian Wallace’s chart-topping 2019 podcast Boomtown, brought together a similar roster, with Jon Hamm as an independent oil baron, Demi Moore as his consigliere wife, and Ali Larter as Thornton’s wild-at-heart ex. “Taylor works in a very unique way, and every actor that he meets with—we basically sit down, we hear what he’s looking to do, where he’s looking to go, and we have to say yes or no based on that. There’s no script,” Moore says. (Sheridan was not available to be interviewed for this story.)
Moore made a long-term commitment to multiple seasons based solely on Sheridan’s track record. “He thinks way ahead. He’s thinking through not just one season. He’s thinking through an epic story,” Moore says. Although oil fields are typically the domain of men, the show highlights the role women play elsewhere in this highly political and dangerous industry. “He writes incredible, complex, dynamic and delicious women who are powerful, vulnerable, flawed,” Moore says. Her character, Cami, is the power behind the power of Hamm’s Monty Miller, who was once merely an oil speculator alongside Thornton’s Tommy Norris. Then he hit the jackpot, while Norris went bust, and is now working tirelessly for his old friend.
“Cami is somebody who is not involved in the business but is running their entire life,” Moore says. “They’re a couple that built this entire empire and family together.”
Unlike the late Larry Hagman’s dastardly oil scion J.R. Ewing in the ’80s series Dallas, or even the womanizing, morally dubious Don Draper that Hamm played on Mad Men, Monty Miller strives to be honorable as well as formidable. His wife is one force that keeps him on track. “Jon said to me at one point, ‘I think this might be the first time I’m playing a character who’s actually in a good relationship, where they actually have real love, commitment, and affection,’” Moore says. “Her focus is her family and their social existence. It’s the ups and downs of keeping him grounded, healthy, and safe.”
Thornton, who first worked with Sheridan when he appeared in a brief role as a US marshal in 1883, said he was drawn to Landman by the prospect of playing a hero whose life has become a shambles even as his work holds together a billionaire’s empire. “Taylor said to me one day, ‘When you go over to this house and you think of where you live, you’re looking around and you think: I could have had this—but it went a different direction,’” Thornton says. “I’m a fixer and a foreman. Even though I work with the head guy, I also work very closely with the people out in the field. I check the wells every day, get the information to give him, I deal with the landowners, and if something happens on that land, if there’s an accident on the rig, I’ve got to solve that problem and go deal with the lawyers.”
It’s hard, often dirty work—in all senses. “There aren’t really a lot of scenes where my character comes home and says, ‘My God, was my day amazing!’” Thornton says. “I slink into the house every day like somebody just beat the hell out of me.”
Ali Larter’s character—the eponymous landman’s ex-wife, Angela—inhabits a very different world. Estranged for years, and long since remarried, she reconnects with him when their grown son, Cooper (played by Jacob Lofland of the Maze Runner films), seeks out risky work in the oil and gas fields. “Her son has pulled away from her and she’s trying to find her way back into his life,” Larter says.
She blames the oil business and her ex-husband’s all-consuming dedication to it for causing their split. “And the bottle,” Larter adds. “There’s definitely those two pieces, but Angela doesn’t really harp on the sad times. That’s just not who she is…. She’s trying to put her family back together and doesn’t always do it in all the best of ways. She loves to wreak havoc in her ex’s life. Everything she does is colorful and big and passionate and full of fire and joy and playfulness.”
Into this maelstrom she also drags their teenage daughter, Ainsley (1923’s Michelle Randolph). “Angela thinks she’s the most amazing mother, but the way that she goes about parenting…she probably shouldn’t be writing any books about it,” Larter says. “She likes to shop with her daughter and travel the world. She likes to get drunk with her daughter. They work out together. It’s like her little mini-me.”
While Thornton’s hardscrabble character is broiling in the desert most of the time, Larter lives larger than even his billionaire bosses. They endeavor to maintain a degree of modesty; Angela has no such restrictions on herself. Larter describes her and Moore’s characters as “100% night and day. Demi plays a real oil heiress, and there’s an elegance to that. Angela is more like a jet-setter traveling the world who is much more splashy and sexy and loud.”
Larter felt her character was pretty far removed from who she is too. “In my life, I live in denim and white shirts, and this woman is bright orange, fiery colors, and neon yellow. She’s dripping in Versace and diamonds,” Larter says. “I’ve spent so much time in Texas, and the people are ballsy there. They’re rebellious and do things the way that they want to do things. The women are put-together, the hair is blonde, the boobs are pushed up, the makeup is done perfectly. She walks in five-inch heels and is loud and splashy and fun. She is very unapologetic about that.”
For Moore, the difference between the two women shows the contrast between having a lot and having nothing to lose. “Cami and Monty have done it. They’ve reached the dream. But it’s one thing to get there—it’s another to keep it. And I think Billy’s character is the one who has to do all the dirty work,” Moore says. “Billy and Ali, their dynamic is just going to be off-the-charts fantastic and kind of juicy.”
The other key creative force behind Landman is Wallace, whose Boomtown podcast became a sensation five years ago, with more than 4.8 million downloads. The show chronicled the present-day oil industry in west Texas, the way it chews up some working-class people while making others unspeakably wealthy. Produced during his time as a journalist at Texas Monthly, the audio series caught the attention of Sheridan—who brought Wallace, a former roughneck oil worker himself, along as an executive producer.
“Taylor is obviously a terrific writer and a world builder, and he was stepping into this world that he knew some stuff about. But really, I was the guide to west Texas oil and gas,” Wallace says. Sheridan was his guide to TV-making, bringing him to the sets of 1883 and Bass Reeves for on-the-job training as they developed Landman into a show. (The title Boomtown was already taken by a short-lived 2002 NBC crime series.)
“He gravitated towards certain stories and characters that were featured in the podcast. So for instance, the Patch Café is one of our main locations in Landman, and it’s loosely based on the Pioneer Café, which is in the first episode of Boomtown,” Wallace says. Both the fictional and the real-life diners serve as a town square in the middle of nowhere. “The day crew is coming in to have their breakfast in the morning, while the night crew is coming in to have their dinner. It’s just a hub of the community where people like Tommy will meet with ranchers to discuss leases, meet with his friends to have a beer.”
Over the course of two years, Wallace and Sheridan devised the story that drew in Thornton, Hamm, Larter, and Moore—one that they all already hope will go on for several more seasons. Thornton describes his title character as a man of honor. The work is dirty, but he is not. Usually. “He’s a guy who wants to be fair. He’s fair to people who deserve it. But if there’s someone who is trying to screw him over, he’ll screw him right back,” the actor says.
In other words, Landman is also about people who make their own rules. “I mean, it’s a Taylor Sheridan show. Of course rough justice is a part of it,” Wallace says. “You are on your own in certain ways. It’s a huge swath of land, and there is a bit of that frontier justice mentality to this day. People try to handle their own problems if they can, especially when it involves business. If you get regulatory agencies involved, it can create a lot of paperwork and a lot of headaches.”
The fuel industry operating in the deserts and border regions of Texas also have to contend with a rival business that is even less ethical: international drug dealers. “The cartels are running this huge multibillion dollar industry alongside oil and gas,” Wallace says. “I mean, you’re close to the border, you’re in this relatively unpopulated area that is a major crossroads for all the drug trafficking in the United States. So the fact that those two worlds in reality and in our show coexist is an important plot point. They’re working kind of next door to one another.”
Wallace’s crash course in filmmaking came to a head on one of those sweltering days that made Thornton nostalgic for northern climates. “The whole thing was a journey for me. But there was one day we were out under the beating Texas sun, and there were chiggers—everyone was getting chigger-bit—and we were getting sunburned. Our medic was doing his absolute best to keep everyone hydrated, but it’s hard. We had a Black Hawk helicopter flying above us and we were blowing up mortars,” Wallace says. “I had found a cow skull on the ground and a prop guy looked at me. He was carrying a fake kilo of cocaine, and he goes, ‘Man, I’d be damned if we weren’t in Vietnam right now.’ It literally felt like you could cue Creedence Clearwater Revival. It really was just a surreal day on set.”
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