TV Interview - Billy Bob Thornton: Rocket man

The Astronaut Farmer star soars in whatever role he pilots

Robert Duvall has called him the “hillbilly Orson Welles,” on account of both his incredible artistic versatility and his upbringing in the pinworm country of rural Host Springs, Ark.

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Even after a two-decade career in Hollyweird, Billy Bob Thornton has managed to hold onto something essential and stay real amid the overblown, tacky parade that is the commercial film industry. Even as he inspires comparison to one of cinema’s most famous renaissance men, he nevertheless remains true to his humble, Southern past.

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Like Welles, a famously multifaceted director, actor, writer, radio personality and gourmand, Billy Bob Thornton, 51, appears unwilling to limit himself to a single job description. Though he co-wrote and co-starred as a cold-blooded scumbag in the crime genre picture One False Move in 1992, Thornton initially burst onto the national film consciousness as the writer, director and star of the idiosyncratic 1996 indie Sling Blade — thus establishing his iconoclastic and wunderkind credentials.

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Over the years, Thornton has assumed, he readily admits, an enormous range of roles in films from Armageddon and The Apostle to Friday Night Lights and The Man Who Wasn’t There. It doesn’t matter whether he’s playing a calculating political operator in Primary Colors or a tortured father in Monster’s Ball who keeps his emotions locked away with a slow-burn, tightly coiled energy. Thornton has played multiple variations on his own brand of iconic American masculinity: blustering or subdued, but almost inevitably in charge. Like Humphrey Bogart — whom, along with Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness, he includes as his role models — traces of Thornton’s idiosyncratic, slightly menacing intensity move beneath the surface of almost all the men he has played.

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“It’s like I play different people in every movie I’ve done: extreme characters in terms of look, leading men, everything,” he says during a press interview promoting The Astronaut Farmer, which opens nationally on Friday. “And not many people do that.”

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As a result, Thornton says, his fan base is a shockingly diverse crowd: “I have a huge fan base with everybody from the Midwest and the South. The good old boys just love me. The farmers and the middle-aged housewives. ...

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“And yet there’s this whole artsy bunch with berets and cigarette holders who think I’m like a genius who are nothing like those people, but they understand that movies like Sling Blade and Monster’s Ball and movies like that are actually kind of edgy independent films.”

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Sitting in a boardroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta, Thornton exudes an air of just-between-us-folks conviviality. He begins his circuit of interviews with the local press drawing X’s and O’s on the notepad at his seat.

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As the conversation continues, he attempts several crudely rendered profiles of women. There is, it seems, one thing the multitalented Thornton can’t do. Thornton shouldn’t abandon his prolific acting, writing, directing, guitar-picking career anytime soon to give Michelangelo a run for his money.

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In his latest role, Thornton takes on another one of his strong, silent types. Salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner Charles Farmer dreams of piloting the silver rocket (which he’s been assembling in his barn) into space. Created by doppelganger writers and directors Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho), The Astronaut Farmer tips its hat to the all-American tales of pluck made by Frank Capra in the 1930s and ’40s.

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But despite an interesting stripe of ’70s-era cynicism expressed in Farmer’s adversarial relationship to the meddling feds and governmental bureaucrats who attempt to destroy his dream, the improbable, nostalgic film is not the best vehicle for the actor’s unique talents. It is, though, indicative of his play-the-field career and his willingness to court the mainstream in between freaking them out in his indie fare.

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It is evident from talking to Thornton that though he has often chafed at how the media have represented him, he also on some level relishes his reputation as filmland’s resident all-over-the-map wild man who, according to legend, wore his former wife Angelina Jolie’s blood on a chain around his neck.

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Without prompting, Thornton jumps to correct the record on that count.

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“What happened was, she bought these things at some kind of souvenir shop or whatever it was. They were little tiny glass lockets on a chain.

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“And literally, we poked the end of our finger, and went like this on the glass,” Thornton mimes smearing a gob of movie-star blood, “closed it up and put it on your neck.”

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Voila. End of story.

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“And it becomes blood vial!

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“So the way it ended up being portrayed, it was like we were wearing a mason jar of blood around our necks.”

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In true Southern appreciation of a tall tale, Thornton is willing to laugh about and relish the peccadilloes of those trash-talking crazies over there in entertainment land.

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The movie industry has been a blessing and a curse, a goofy topsy-turvy world that has attempted to turn Thornton’s dislike of gaudy, ornate old shit from Scotland and England (“Yeah, I don’t like creepy old castles, but who does, really?”) into some pathological scaredy-cat fear of antique high boys and dinette sets. But movieland has been good to Thornton, too.

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When he was just starting out as an actor in Hollywood, Thornton was a waiter at a Christmas Eve party. One of the guests was the legendary film director Billy Wilder, who with the prophetic entitlement of the very old and very talented, told Thornton he should consider chucking acting.

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As Thornton remembers it: “He said, ‘You got to create your own stories, come up with your own characters, come up with something different than the rest of them. Writing is the way. This town needs writers, not actors.’”

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It is testament to the Thornton way that he kind of took Wilder’s advice.

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He did pursue his screenwriting.

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He also kept acting.

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He just decided to do it all.