The 2001 co-star Billy Bob Thornton assaulted because they asked him to: “I was hitting him pretty hard”
Method actors can be a strange bunch at the best of times, and when one of them asked Billy Bob Thornton to beat the shit out of them for real in front of the cameras, he was happy to oblige.
The Academy Award-winning screenwriter can often come across as a prickly fella, but not a particularly violent one. Throwing hands isn’t his forte, but there’s only so much you can do when one of your scene partners is demanding that you start laying in those shots for real.
2001 was probably the most interesting year of Thornton’s career, for various reasons. In his personal life, he was more famous than he’d ever been and was under more media scrutiny than he had before or since, but that comes with the territory when you marry Angelina Jolie and tell everyone you’d shagged in the car on your way to the Oscars.
Onscreen, he had the greatest on-set experience of his life when he made Barry Levinson’s Bandits with Bruce Willis and Cate Blanchett, gave the most overlooked performance in his filmography in the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, and did a favour for a friend by starring in writer, director, leading man, and long-time buddy Dwight Yoakam’s western, South of Heaven, West of Hell.
He still found the time to have another two films released, although Daddy and Them isn’t one he’ll want to remember too fondly, since it also featured his then-partner Laura Dern, who didn’t discover that they’d officially separated and broken off their engagement until she found out he’d married Jolie.
Then there was Monster’s Ball, which saw Thornton engaging in a sex scene with Halle Berry that was so graphic, explicit, and realistic that the latter has spent decades being offended by accusations that they were doing it for real. Remarkably, that wasn’t the only time in the movie that the former’s performance veered into ultra-authentic territory.
At one stage, the actor’s Hank Grotowski lays hands on his son Sonny, played by Heath Ledger. “That scene right there, I was really hitting Heath,” Thornton explained. “And he asked me to. I said, ‘Now, listen, I’m a little more of a veteran than you. When I was a young actor, I used to ask people to hit me, and it hurts.'”
However, despite his tender years, the precocious up-and-comer insisted that he get absolutely walloped. “I said, ‘I’ll do it if you want me to’, and he said, ‘Please,'” the Sling Blade figurehead noted. “He said he needed it. And I was hitting him pretty hard.” Ledger wasn’t necessarily a method actor by trade, but he was nonetheless known for his intense commitment and dedication to character.
In this instance, that meant that he felt like Thornton slapping him around with as much force as possible on Monster’s Ball was the right course of action, and despite his initial hesitance, his older co-star went along with it.
