Every one of Billy Bob Thornton’s odd phobias, ranked from least to most weird
In the early 2000s, Billy Bob Thornton and then-wife Angelina Jolie once wore matching lockets containing each other’s blood around their necks, and while he has tried to play it down in later years, a reputation as an oddball has stuck closely ever since.
Turns out, a lot of people think that wearing your lover’s blood around your neck is a spooky thing to do. Thornton isn’t freaked out by trifling things like pendants full of Count Dracula’s meal. Instead, he gets the willies from antique furniture. Allow me to explain.
Over the years, Thornton has been disarmingly honest about the many and sundry things that creep him out, and some of them are truly weird. First of all, though, his least bizarre phobia is one that countless people in this great, big world share: germs. During a 2016 appearance on the Jim and Sam Show podcast, Thornton revealed that he suffers from a funny mix of germophobia and co-dependency, so when fans want an autograph or to shake his hand, he’s only too happy to do it. Just don’t be offended if he then drowns his mitts in hand sanitiser afterwards; hypochondria will do that to you.
Hilariously, he also ran through a hypothetical scenario in which he could work through his germophobia ever-so-slightly. “I mean, let’s say I go into a rag shop and I see a really great Deep Purple shirt,” he mused, clearly getting invested in his story. “It’s on a rack with a bunch of other dusty old shirts”. At this point, part of Thornton will want to run in the opposite direction, but another part of him really, really wants that shirt. So, he revealed his solution: “I buy it. I go home and I wash the thing up to, you know, three or four times”.
While being a germophobe isn’t the most unusual phobia, Thornton’s next one is a bit more out there: Komodo dragons. Now most people wouldn’t want to encounter one in a dark alley, however, these lizards are an endangered species, and the chances of someone like Thornton actually finding himself sharing space with is pretty remote.
Still, he told Playboy magazine in 2003, “Komodo dragons have this horribly toxic bacteria in their mouths. When they bite you, you go blind. Then they all gather around you and watch you die like they are watching fucking television. They don’t eat you right away.” While this may have been the scientific thinking up until 2013, new research suggests that the bacteria in a Komodo’s mouth is perfectly ordinary, and no more toxic than any other carnivore. Hopefully, Thornton caught that update on National Geographic while channel-surfing late at night.
Next up, an undeniably peculiar phobia: antique furniture. This eyebrow-raising fear first became known in 2003 when Thornton starred alongside Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon in Richard Curtis’ classic romcom Love Actually. “Billy Bob Thornton hates antiques,” McCutcheon chuckled to Entertainment Weekly, “and Hugh was constantly pointing at pieces that were 500 years old. And Billy Bob was going, ‘Oh my Gahd, Hugh, I dun’t laake this’.”
According to Thornton, though, he isn’t scare of all antique furniture. For instance, if you put him in front of a 100-year-old Asian chair or a Mexican table? He won’t bat an eyelid. But anything from more ancient times in Europe, or, as he puts it poetically, “French/English/Scottish old mildewy stuff”, will make him break out in a sweat. “Old dusty heavy drapes and big tables with lions’ heads carved in it,” Thornton explained to The New York Times in 2012 with a shudder, “Stuff that kings were around. That’s the stuff I can’t be around.” So, in essence, don’t ever take Thornton to a crumbling castle in the Scottish Highlands, or a Victorian building in London, because he’ll be out of there so fast your head will spin.
For my money, though, Thornton’s most bizarre phobia is two-time British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Or, more accurately, Disraeli’s notably pointy beard, which dangled off his chin in a faintly devilish manner. Thornton claimed this fear first manifested when he watched an old movie in which Disraeli was a character sitting in an “old, weird room, with old heavy drapes” (the drapes again!). Thornton felt queasy looking at his beard and remarked, “Something about the way it swept out…I couldn’t breathe too well”. Yep. That’s pretty darn weird, Billy Bob.
