“It eats me alive, from inside”: the betrayal Billy Bob Thornton will never be able to forgive
Over the years, Billy Bob Thornton has learned a lot about forgiveness. The beloved star of hit movies like Bad Santa and Friday Night Lights has been a working actor, writer, and director in Hollywood for more than 30 years. For every dizzying high he’s experienced, though, he’s also been to the bottom of the barrel a few times and experienced a few significant betrayals.
Interestingly, while most cinephiles know Thornton as an actor, he first broke into Hollywood by writing his own material. In 1992, his crime script One False Move was turned into a low-budget film intended to go straight to video, but positive reviews and word of mouth brought it a minor theatrical release. Then, in 1994, Thornton wrote and starred in the short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade, which led him to turn the story of mentally challenged murderer Karl Childers into the feature film Sling Blade in 1996.
This bracing drama marked Thornton as one of the most exciting triple threats in Hollywood, as he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay,’ nabbed a nomination for ‘Best Actor,’ and received rave reviews for his direction, too. Over the next couple of years, another few Thornton scripts made it to the big screen, most notably the supernatural mystery The Gift, directed by Sam Raimi, before Thornton got the chance to make one of his passion projects: All the Pretty Horses, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel.
Unfortunately for Thornton, the process of making All the Pretty Horses was so traumatic that it made him physically ill and caused deep wounds that took many years to even come close to healing. In fact, he had such bad memories of the experience that it tortured him for years, until he eventually realised it was bad for his health to hang onto that ill feeling. “That destroys me,” he told Deadline in 2024. “It eats me alive, from inside. And so I’ve learned: I’ve forgiven everybody who ever did anything to me.”
This might sound like a nice platitude, but Thornton truly had to work hard for years to forgive the person he felt had wronged him on All the Pretty Horses – and it’s debatable as to whether he truly ever found that forgiveness in his heart. In the end, he simply had to let go of what producer Harvey Weinstein put him through.
Thornton’s film, which starred Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, was a faithful adaptation of McCarthy’s characteristically spare, thought-provoking writing. The story wasn’t a romance between Damon’s cowboy and Cruz’s daughter of a Mexican aristocrat, per se, even though that was certainly part of it. Instead, McCarthy used their relationship to explore how desire can go unrequited and how society can beat the passion out of a young couple.
Naturally, this isn’t an easy sell to audiences, so producer Weinstein decided to go all in on the romance angle, altering the entire tenor and point of Thornton’s film. He also forced the director to bring the movie in under two hours, instead of releasing his two-hour and 42-minute assembly cut – a cut that Damon said amounted to “my favourite movie that I ever worked on.” The argument about the movie’s runtime led to stories in the press about Thornton pushing a five-hour cut, which he claimed was never a reality, and was instead Weinstein using his clout to plant false stories that made him seem unreasonable.
During this period of his life, Thornton had heart issues, and Damon claimed the stress involved in All the Pretty Horses exacerbated them. He even went so far as to allege, “Billy had a heart problem at that time, and it was because his heart fucking broke from fighting for that film.” Whatever the case, from Thornton’s perspective with the benefit of decades of hindsight, he mused, “I think he just wanted it under two hours for more theatre runs. It really damaged All the Pretty Horses [and] made me never want to direct again.”
Ultimately, All the Pretty Horses sank without a trace at the box office, and Thornton took 13 years to direct a movie again. Then, when allegations of sexual assault against Weinstein rocked Hollywood, Thornton was forced to reckon with his dealings with the notorious producer. In the end, though, he had to stick with his drive for forgiveness, as that was the only way he could deal with the All the Pretty Horses debacle. “I don’t forget what he is and what he did to me or anybody else,” Thornton clarified, “But one of the best lessons I’ve learned in my life was, don’t hold grudges. Let go of the past. Don’t let it dictate your future.”
