Billy Bob Thornton names the only “perfect” role of his career: “It sounds amazing to me”
Perfection is something that everybody strives for but very few attain, although Billy Bob Thornton was convinced he’d found it when one role gave him everything he’d ever wanted and more.
Everybody has their own interpretation of what ‘perfect’ is and what it should look like, and mentioning the word in conjunction with an actor, a performance, a movie, or a TV show is a can of worms that nobody’s been able to keep shut since it was first opened.
Has Billy Bob Thornton ever been in a perfect movie? Objectively, no. Has he ever given a perfect performance? No, has anyone? Was he hired to play a character that blew his mind in terms of what it offered him from a personal, professional, and presumably financial perspective? He was, and he was undeniably thrilled about it.
After decades as a jobbing actor, he opted to make his own luck, which he did spectacularly when Sling Blade won him an Academy Award. Since then, he’s occupied his niche as a versatile character actor and occasional leading man who can always be relied on to turn up, do the work, and not phone it in, unless he’s been cast in Michael Bay’s Armageddon, in which case he will.
Like many of his contemporaries, Thornton was always dismissive of taking his talents to television because he’d been brought up in an era when that was any star’s admission of defeat, with the small screen derisively viewed as a semi-retirement home where former big names got easy paycheques.
Of course, the post-millennium ‘Golden Age’ and streaming changed all of that, which convinced him to break the habit of a lifetime. Thornton hadn’t been a regular on a TV show since his political sitcom, Hearts Afire, ended in 1995. He wet his whistle with the first season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, before taking his first-ever leading role in an episodic drama when Goliath premiered in October 2016.
“If you asked me five years ago, I’d have said, ‘No way in hell,'” he told UPI when asked if he ever thought he’d play the main character in a multi-season TV series. “Now it sounds amazing to me. I’ve never had a situation this perfect in terms of my career, because I have a family, and we will shoot in town, and I’m on it for half a year. That allows me to do a movie, make a record, tour, and be with my family a lot.”
Quite frankly, he couldn’t see a downside. Goliath‘s four seasons only had eight episodes each, which left him plenty of free time. Between the release of the first episode and the finale in September 2021, Thornton appeared in three features, two TV shows, released four studio albums with his band, The Boxmasters, went on several nationwide tours, and still got to spend time with his wife and kids.
It was the gift that kept on giving, until it ended after the fourth season. However, with Landman looking well-placed to be renewed for a third run, he might have hit that sweet spot for a second time.
