“I’m not very smart,” warns Billy Bob Thornton. “Try and keep the questions really simple. My IQ is about 42.” Nice try, Billy. A wiry, goateed, wolfish figure, the 70-year-old is nothing if not a shrewd actor and filmmaker; lest we forget he won an Oscar for penning his 1996 directorial debut Sling Blade. There have been blockbusters (Armageddon), indies (The Man Who Wasn’t There, Bad Santa) and prestige TV (Fargo, Goliath), alongside his long-standing musical outfit The Boxmasters, who just opened for The Who in Miami and Newark.
Now he’s back for the second season of Landman, the Paramount+ Texan drama co-created by Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan. It’s a show that’s catapulted him back into the public eye. “I love playing the character,” he drawls, enthusing about oil man Tommy Norris and a cast that includes Demi Moore, Andy Garcia and Ali Larter. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever worked on anything where there’s not a bad apple in the bunch. Of course, Taylor wrote Tommy for me so that makes it a lot easier. It fits like a glove in a lot of ways.”
With his careworn face, Thornton is perfectly tailored to Norris, an executive for the West Texas-based independent company M Tex Oil, who acts as the bridge between the board room and the oil fields. He may fly in private jets but he’s a pragmatic soul, the opposite of his flashy, outlandish ex-wife Angela, played by Larter. In one of the more amusing exchanges in the first episode of season two, she feeds the family with expensive truffle. “You’re shitting me,” he exclaims, discovering it cost $2800. “For a mushroom?”
Thornton has been wed six times, including to Angelina Jolie, so knows a thing or two about marriage. He chuckles at the mention of the truffle scene. “That’s my own relationship with my wife, too,” he says, referring to actress Connie Angland who he’s been married to since 2014. “She’s a lot more free with the money than I am because I grew up poor, so I still have that mentality. Taylor is not an extravagant guy [either]. He likes what he likes. If he has a good saddle for his horse…”
Is it strange to play such a wealthy character? “Yes,” he nods. “I still, to this day, get really nervous around wealthy people. I mean, when I’m invited to their parties or something, I tend to be a little bit of a wallflower. In a lot of ways, I still feel like I don’t fit in. I’ve been in conversations where they’re talking about the best Cuban cigars and their favourite ski resorts… I’m not part of that world.”
“I don’t think most movies I made could be made now”
He is, however, an honorary Texan. “I’m what they call a Tex-Arkansan.” Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the state next to Texas, he still has cousins in the Dallas Forth Worth area. “What’s different about Texans is that they almost think of themselves as their own country,” he says. “There’s a pride in Texas and you have to be around it for a while. You may not notice it if you went down there for a weekend but if you spent a few months in Texas, you would absolutely see it.”
After this show he’s likely to have an oil well named after him. There hasn’t been an oilman this cool since J.R. Ewing in Dallas all those years ago, although Tommy is far from Machiavellian. “He’s a reluctant president,” says Thornton of the corporate fixer for M Tex. And this season he’s got a lot to fix following the passing of owner Monty Miller. His widow Cami (Demi Moore) is now in charge.
The real grist comes with the arrival of Gallino (Andy Garcia), a wealthy, powerful, slick and incredibly dangerous man who has got his clutches into Tommy’s son Cooper (Jacob Lofland). Needless to say, it’s gonna get toxic. “You know the old term ‘strange bedfellows’? It’s already been set up that we have to be adjacent to each other. But don’t make any mistake about it, [Tommy thinks] ‘I don’t like what you do’.”
The other pleasure of Landman is watching the fierce female characters circle around Thornton’s Tommy. Ali Larter, famed for the Final Destination series, is a hoot as Angela, whether she’s punching authority figures or giving Tommy oral pleasure in a moving car. She and Thornton didn’t know each other before the show began. “There’s no explanation for it but we had an immediate chemistry,” he says. “[I’m] happy to see Ali catapulted into the stardom that she hasn’t had before. I mean, she’s been in a lot of stuff, but I don’t think she has been in the position she’s in now.”
Then there’s Demi Moore, back in the mix after her wild Oscar-nominated turn in The Substance. “Demi and I have known each other for a long, long time. I’m very happy for her. I mean, we’ve all had hills and valleys in our careers. And my valleys were normally when I just chose not to work for a period of time. I’m so happy to see her making this great comeback.”
So what about coping with his own valleys? “As my grandmother used to say, I kind of leave things up to providence,” he replies, delighted to have found his groove in television. “I’m very comfortable there because you get to develop a character over a period of time and you get to be with the same people from multiple years. And I think I like this better than I liked movies… or I like it better than the movies I think I would make now.”
Thornton wasn’t an early adopter of long-form television. “I was a holdout because when I was coming up as a movie actor, doing TV was a bad sign. It meant your career was on the way down. Now it’s changed because of streaming. My manager actually said to me, ‘This is where it’s headed. This is the future.’ And sure enough, most actors and directors now want to be in streaming.”
“Landman is not one of the [TV shows] that you want to get out of”
Appearing in the first season of Fargo inspired Thornton to move into TV. “Fargo is the thing that set me on fire to do this. I loved doing it.” It was a wise move, as Thornton feels out of step with a film business almost solely focused on event movies now. “I don’t think most movies I made could be made now. I don’t know that they would make Monster’s Ball. I don’t know that they would make Sling Blade. And I’m sure not Bad Santa.”
Certainly, movies about a prison guard on Death Row, a newly-released psychiatric inmate or a foul-tempered Father Christmas aren’t probably top of the agenda for most studio execs these days. But it hardly matters, with Thornton signed up for four seasons of Landman. “I would gladly do season three if they so choose,” he says. “This is not one of the ones that you want to get out of.” Spoken like a man with a high IQ.
‘Landman’ season two episode one is out now via Paramount+ with new episodes airing every Sunday