Billy Bob Thornton names the toughest role of his career: “The hardest part I ever played”
Some actors like to challenge themselves with every part they play, while others like to alternate between heavy lifting and taking it a little easier. Apart from a few obvious exceptions, Billy Bob Thornton has always tried to approach his career from the former perspective.
There aren’t many entries in his filmography that you could point to as blatant cash-grabs, which is admirable when he’s got almost 100 of them. Michael Bay’s Armageddon is the most pronounced, largely because it’s the only one that he specifically admitted he took for the money.
Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground is another, which almost ended in disaster when Thornton nearly died during shooting, but perhaps it taught him a lesson. Since then, he hasn’t often been caught sleepwalking his way through a movie or TV show that he’s only making for the paycheque, but there have been a couple.
His supporting turn as an exposition-spouting FBI agent in the techno thriller, Eagle Eye, is definitely one of them, and no matter how hard he tried, the Academy Award winner couldn’t convince anyone that he fulfilled almost the exact same duties as another government official in Netflix’s The Gray Man to test himself as a performer.
These days, he seems to have found his niche. Having avoided TV for most of his professional life because of the stigmas that used to be attached to recognisable actors emigrating to the small screen, episodic television has given him everything he ever wanted, with the added benefit of awards season adulation.
Fargo, Goliath, and Landman have kept him busy for a few months of the year, which affords him the opportunity to spend the rest of his free time writing, recording, and touring with his band, the Boxmasters, with each of those shows earning him a Golden Globe nomination, and he won for the first two.
None of those characters are especially taxing, especially when Landman‘s Tommy Norris was written for him by Taylor Sheridan before he’d even signed on, and a quarter of a century after its release, it could take some beating for the Coen brothers creation, Ed Crane, to be dislodged as his toughest-ever gig.
“That guy in The Man Who Wasn’t There, that guy in so many ways is me,” Thornton told The Guardian. “I can be outgoing, and it was the hardest part I ever played, because the tension of the movie rests on my face. But half of me is just like that guy. A guy who doesn’t know why the hell he’s here, and doesn’t know where he belongs, and would rather go and sit off by himself someplace and be quietly desperate.”
The actor, writer, and filmmaker has never been comfortable with his position as a Hollywood celebrity, and essentially playing himself in The Man Who Wasn’t There made him more uncomfortable than ever. It’s a knockout performance in an unsung gem, though, and Thornton’s unease with shouldering the burden of carrying a movie as a guy not unlike himself may explain why his method acting went so badly awry.
