The 19th-century politician Billy Bob Thornton is absolutely terrified of: “He would break out in a sweat”
People can be afraid of anything. Whether it’s clowns, spiders, heights, or enclosed spaces, phobias are an everyday fact of life for a lot of folks who tremble with fear at the mere sight – or mention – of the thing that terrifies them most. There are no limits on what constitutes a phobia, although it’s hard to think of any more unusual than the one person who terrifies actor Billy Bob Thornton the most.
The actor grew up in rural Arkansas, which isn’t a place where the spectre of a 19th-century British politician would constantly haunt him. Even when starting out as an actor, he remained completely oblivious to the overriding terror that would reduce him to a trembling wreck. However, once a new fear is unlocked, it’s impossible to put it back in the box.
This is a guy who made it to the top the hard way; Thornton’s upbringing was so impoverished that he made do without running water and electricity at times, only to claw his way up the Hollywood ladder first as a character actor before winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ in Sling Blade, which opened countless doors that he’s been walking through ever since.
Of course, his personal life has become associated with some unusual asides and incidents, but how the hell did he end up so scared of Benjamin Disraeli? A two-time prime minister of the United Kingdom who died 73 years before Thornton was born, it’s impossible to imagine a justifiable scenario where he would evolve into an overarching nemesis capable of making the actor and filmmaker’s blood run cold.
And yet, thanks to a film he can’t remember and wishes he’d never seen, Thornton was traumatised. “I was watching some old movie, I don’t remember the name of it, but Benjamin Disraeli was just a character in it,” he explained. “He was in this old, weird room with old heavy drapes, and there was just something about his hair.”
“I thought, ‘God knows what’s going on with that hair,'” he continued. “I don’t know what it was. Maybe some food accidentally got in there somehow. There was something about the way it swept out. I couldn’t breathe too well.” Fortunately, as an American actor, there was no chance Thornton and Disraeli’s paths would ever cross, right? Wrong.
In what could only be described as a one-in-a-million coincidence, Thornton was cast as the American president in Richard Curtis’ Love Actually. In the festive staple, there’s a sequence where he turns up at 10 Downing Street to meet Hugh Grant’s prime minister, and in the name of realism, one of the props just so happened to be a portrait of Disraeli, something that wasn’t lost on his troublemaking co-star.
“I remember doing Love Actually with Billy Bob Thornton, who, as you know, is unusual,” Grant recalled, per UPI. “And he had a proper phobia about 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. He’s terrified of him. We had a set that was supposed to be 10 Downing Street, and I found a picture of Disraeli, and I used to come up and just push it in front of Billy Bob, and he would break out in a sweat.”
Only in Hollywood could someone develop a fear as random and irrational as Benjamin Disraeli and end up having weaponised against them, an experience Thornton has probably spent the last two decades trying to erase from his memory.
