You would think a performing arts hall in Connecticut named after Katharine Hepburn, in a quiet seaside town like Old Saybrook would be safe. You would think a crowd of mostly ex-hippie gray-hairs, who had paid to sit in plush red chairs, hear you sing and have you sign their “Bad News Bears” posters, would be free of hecklers.
You would be wrong. And now Billy Bob Thornton, on tour with his rock band the Boxmasters, was going to have to invite a man who had just called him a “condescending jerk” — except he hadn’t shouted “jerk” — to come up and sit on the edge of the stage with him and work this out, man to man. He was going to have to explain, as he has surely gotten tired of explaining, that he isn’t who you think he is.
“I can tell you people that I know personally, who will walk by every fan and not even look at them,” he said from the stage. “I stand by the bus and I sign every person’s picture. I talk to everybody. I take a picture with everyone.”
It was, in the end, a perfectly pleasant conversation, but one might assume that at 69, a man of Thornton’s acclaim and accomplishments wouldn’t feel the need to plead his case at all. Again wrong. While he was reluctant to talk about the incident when we caught up by phone a few weeks later, he is otherwise open about his insecurities and his feelings of being misunderstood, just as he is open about his disappointments — particularly his disappointments with Hollywood.
If Thornton has appeared to pull back from Hollywood a bit in recent years, that is by design. The once up-and-coming filmmaker who wrote, directed and starred in the Oscar-winning “Sling Blade” had already given up writing and directing movies years ago because of how studios treated him just after that 1996 film — something he is “still pissed off” about, he said. He still loves acting but is increasingly selective: His role in the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” premiering Sunday on Paramount+, is one of only a handful of major roles he has taken since “Bad Santa 2,” from 2016.
The Sheridan-verse, birthed with “Yellowstone,” has become something of a refuge for actors of a certain demographic who have, perhaps, become a little frustrated with Hollywood — Kevin Costner, Sam Elliott, Sylvester Stallone — and specialize in playing beloved versions of themselves. This suits Thornton fine. His Amazon series “Goliath” (2016-21) was, by his own admission, about a guy who was basically Thornton if Thornton were a down-and-out lawyer in Santa Monica. “Landman” is about a guy who is basically Thornton if Thornton had a job putting out fires, figurative and literal, on a West Texas oil field.
“You put yourself into it and that’s going to be your strongest performance — it just stands to reason it’s better than pretending,” he said. Did he ever worry that playing mostly extensions of himself might become limiting? “Well, there’s about 50 of me,” he said. As in, he contains multitudes. “So I don’t run out of anything, no.”
He has plenty to work with. With age has come wisdom, and Thornton has mellowed, he acknowledged, since the days when a certain bad-boy, hotheaded public image dogged him. But his emotional rawness, the kind of inner sensitivity that might make a man stop a whole concert in order to convince a random stranger that he is not, in fact, a jerk — that has never gone away.
As Thornton put it, “I’m still 19. That’s the fact of the matter.”
Because it turns out if you grew up a poor hillbilly kid from Malvern, Ark., with a lousy dad, that never goes away entirely either. If you had to survive off the kitchen leftovers from the pizzeria where you worked, then you may never shake the feeling that you are inherently a person who deserves only leftovers, and not a person who has earned an Oscar, the adoration of fans, a loving family.
You may always feel vulnerable. You may always feel twisted up by your dual nature.
“I’m 50 percent sad and 50 percent happy all the time, at the same time,” he said. “That’s pretty much the way I’ve always been. It’s insecurity and sadness and fear. And then on the other side, I’m a pretty open, happy person. I know it sounds kind of complicated, but it’s really the truth.”
SUCCESS DIDN’T COME early for Thornton, but when it did come, it was explosive. He broke out seemingly from nowhere during an auspicious time for American auteurs, the ’90s indie film boom — first with the script for “One False Move,” which he wrote with his old friend Tom Epperson, and then with “Sling Blade.”
“Sling Blade,” about an Arkansas man with intellectual disabilities who killed his mother when he was 12, made Thornton famous at age 41. A subsequent run of acting roles in films including “A Simple Plan,” “Armageddon” and “Monster’s Ball” made him more famous. So did the tattoos, his marriage to Angelina Jolie and the tales about their escapades. (Those included wearing vials of each other’s blood, which he has since clarified were lockets, each containing only a drop of blood.)
His first forays into TV had similarly good timing. In 2014, when TV was not yet teeming with movie stars, he earned an Emmy nod for playing Lorne Malvo, a hit man with Spock bangs, in Season 1 of FX’s “Fargo.” In “Goliath,” which debuted in 2016, Thornton played the kind of antihero he does well — lovable because of his flaws not despite them. The performance earned him a Golden Globe.
In teaming with Sheridan, Thornton joins the man who, with “Yellowstone,” lays claim to TV’s most popular drama. Based on the first three episodes, “Landman” offers elements familiar to any “Yellowstone” fan. It is gritty but soapy — the dramatic equivalent of that orange stuff used to scrub oil off your hands. It delights in torching progressive pieties. It’s a male fantasy about roughnecks and the unrealistically attractive women who love them.
Above all, though, it is the Billy Bob Thornton show. It is funny. It is blunt. His character, Tommy, has Thornton’s trademark disgruntled Everyman pathos. The one-liners and the f-bombs feel as lived-in as an old pair of Wranglers. There’s even a winking line from “Bad Santa.”
Christian Wallace, who created the series with Sheridan, met Thornton on the set of “1883,” a “Yellowstone” prequel, in which Thornton played a guest role. Sheridan had invited Wallace, a former Texas Monthly writer, to discuss doing a show inspired by Wallace’s podcast “Boomtown,” about the Permian Basin. Sheridan had already made up his mind about the lead.
“That was the one true North Star, was that Billy’s our guy,” Wallace said. “I couldn’t think of anyone outside of Billy once Taylor told me that he was our guy. I was like, Of course.”
The show is also about a business that doesn’t often get detailed dramatic treatment, despite its role in nearly every aspect of modern life. Humanity’s addiction to oil is strangling the planet, but the show withholds judgment about the industry itself — which, this being Taylor Sheridan, means at least one humbling lecture to a politically correct young lawyer who is also very hot (Kayla Wallace).
But point taken. We are all hypocrites.
“I think he told the truth in this,” Thornton said of Sheridan. “And the truth is that it would be awesome if we could find a way to make this world clean. We don’t have one yet.” (Sheridan declined to comment.)
Thornton’s colleagues say he set a tone of authenticity and generosity on set. “He comes with no ego,” said Ali Larter, who plays Tommy’s ex-wife. His work, she said, was defined by “quiet power and confidence.”
For Thornton, he’s just acting what he knows.
“My method started when I was born,” he said. “If you’ve lived a life like I did, you don’t have to think about when your dad ran over your cat. My dad did. So I don’t have to make it up.”
THE MORE YOU TALK to Thornton and people who know him, the more you understand — and believe — when he says he never felt at ease in Hollywood. Not many people would who grew up without running water, or worked in a saw mill, or became addicted to morphine as a teenager.
Epperson, who grew up with Thornton in Malvern and lived with him in the lean years, cried on the phone while telling the story of the night he broke the news about Thorton’s younger brother Jimmy. Jimmy had died unexpectedly of a previously unknown heart condition. Thornton was in his early 30s.
“That had a deep, deep impact on him,” Epperson said. “I think he told me at one point his heart was permanently broken.”
In Connecticut, and later by phone, Thornton spoke about heartbreak, but only as it pertained to Hollywood. The short version, well documented, is that after “Sling Blade” Thornton signed a multi-picture deal with Miramax Films, which was run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. One of his films, “Daddy and Them,” was a deeply personal movie that features a cursing Andy Griffith and a rare scripted role for John Prine.
Another was his 2000 adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel “All the Pretty Horses,” which Miramax slashed by about an hour. The movie bombed, and Thornton was livid, convinced that his cut would have fared better. “Daddy and Them,” which was being held till after “Horses” premiered, got a limited release, effectively buried.
“He hated Harvey Weinstein — which, it’s OK to hate Harvey Weinstein now, but back then you don’t want to publicly hate Harvey Weinstein,” Epperson said. “But Billy’s not tactful,” he added — Billy has a temper. “It really just kind of blew up his directing career.”
These days, Thornton writes only songs. He has little urge to direct. “I think I’m pretty irrelevant as a writer and director in the movie business now,” he said. Anyway, suppose he did direct a film? What then?
“There are 1.5 billion critics now — when I was coming up, we had like 25,” he said. “Now it’s some guy named Tony who writes [expletive] that actually has an impact. And it’s like: Why? Tony works at Costco.”
Still, there was a difference, he insisted, between being mad about specific episodes in life and becoming consumed by grievance, as some of his friends had. He loves touring, as he has done since he was 16, and he is grateful for everything his career in acting has given him. He seemed genuinely excited to talk about “Landman.”
In Old Saybrook, he held doors for strangers, thanked bartenders effusively. When a reporter found that his dining options backstage were limited to a plate of buns and some ketchup, he offered half his veggie burger.
“I’m a pretty joyous guy — I love life; I love my family; I love my work,” he said. “I’m not going to live my life in bitterness.”
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