Billy Bob Thornton’s strange obsession with ‘My Little Pony’: “Like a Jim Jones cult”
Yes, he’s an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, an Oscar-nominated and two-time Golden Globe-winning actor, and has been a reliable presence onscreen for the last three decades, but Billy Bob Thornton is also a very strange guy.
In a way, it’s not out of the ordinary for someone who revealed they occasionally hunted squirrels and consumed them for sustenance as a child while growing up in rural Arkansas, who made their way to Hollywood and succeeded despite being told by the legendary Billy Wilder that they were too ugly to make it would be a little weird.
Thornton has several phobias, and some of them are stranger than others. He’s got a noted aversion to plastic cutlery, and is terrified of komodo dragons because they have “this horribly toxic bacteria in their mouths” which means that “when they bite you, you go blind” and “then they all gather around you and watch you die like they’re watching fucking television.”
Fortunately, he probably doesn’t encounter too many of those in his line of work, but he’s also frightened of antiques: the dustier, the more haunting. However, his number one fear is the facial hair of the former Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, which Hugh Grant weaponised to traumatise him on Love Actually.
With all that in mind, there’s nothing bizarre about Thornton watching My Little Pony. After all, he spent a lot of time watching it when his youngest daughter was growing up, like a lot of fathers do. Then again, the way he analysed the dynamic between the characters borders on obsession, especially when he dropped Marilyn Monroe and the Jonestown cult into the mix.
Not being particularly well-versed in My Little Pony and its mythology, Thornton handily deconstructed the deeper meaning between a character called Starlight Glimmer and her peers after founding a new village where everyone can live in harmony with ‘cutie marks’ of equal meaning, whatever the hell they are.
“So anyway, suddenly they get captured by them and told that they have to remove their cutie marks and get equal signs,” he enthused to GQ. “But they said, ‘You know what? No.’ So Fluttershy, who is my favourite because she kind of talks like Marilyn Monroe, says, ‘Oh, yes’. Fluttershy acts like she wants to become a member, you know?”
No, Billy Bob Thornton, we do not know. Does further elaboration help? “And then she notices something, like it rains,” he continued. “And it washes off Starlight Glimmer’s equal sign, and she’s got her own cutie mark. So she’s like a Jim Jones cult, you know, right?” Again, we still don’t know.
For whatever reason, the first thing that popped into Thornton’s head when he was watching this My Little Pony storyline unfold was that it contained eerie parallels to the Jonestown massacre, where the eponymous leader convinced 900 of his followers to take their own lives via cyanide-laced punch.
Has anyone ever made that connection before? Hopefully not. Either way, he sounds unusually invested in the animated kids’ show, even if the Jonestown connection surely wasn’t intended by anyone involved in making it.
