The movie Billy Bob Thornton called a “two-hour piece of trash” he regretted making: “I wish I hadn’t”
As an outsider who moved from Arkansas to LA and started on the bottom rung of the ladder before becoming an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and an in-demand actor, Billy Bob Thornton shouldn’t really have to tell anyone that he’s not interested in playing the Hollywood game.
He does it anyway, though, as if reminders were needed. The actor, writer, director, and musician doesn’t play politics, doesn’t bend the knee, and he’s one of the few big names in the business who’ll gladly stop to pose for pictures and sign autographs for anyone who wants them, because he knows he wouldn’t be where he is today if it wasn’t for the audiences who’ve supported him along the way.
One of the downsides of refusing to be absorbed into the mainstream, at least not to the fullest extent possible, is that Thornton has turned down several hefty paydays. He knocked back offers to play villains in Spider-Man and Mission: Impossible movies, which would have no doubt offered him the biggest salaries of his entire career.
For the most part, blockbuster fluff is something he’s avoided like the plague, which could have something to do with almost being killed when he first dipped his toes into action-packed waters in Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground, the beginning and end of his stunt-heavy performances.
However, since he’s been married six times, he’s also had five divorces to pay for. Independent fare that challenges him as a performer won’t pay the bills, and when he was in dire need of cash, Thornton compromised his principles to star in the only movie he made solely for the riches on offer.
Michael Bay’s Armageddon was the highest-grossing release of 1998, and every bit as nonsensical as viewers had come to expect from the director. One thing that made it stand out from the pack was an ensemble cast full of character actors, with Thornton playing Nasa’s executive director, Dan Truman.
It wasn’t the most challenging part of his career, and with the benefit of hindsight, it evidently wasn’t his favourite. Almost a decade and a half after the fact, during which he’d worked with Terrence Malick, Sam Raimi, the Coen brothers, Richard Linklater, and other talented auteurs, he dismissed the film as “a two-hour piece of trash I wish I hadn’t done.”
“I only want to do things that have integrity, and I don’t mean for that to sound pompous,” he explained to Tony Clayton-Lea. “What I mean by that is, I think we’ve got enough commercial rubbish in the world already, and I don’t want to add anything to that.” To that end, he claimed that he’d “been offered about 20 movies in the past two months and I’ve turned every one of them down.”
While he should be commended and admired for refusing to spend his days chasing the money, that still doesn’t explain what he was doing in Dwayne Johnson’s Faster and Netflix’s The Gray Man, neither of which required him to flex his dramatic muscles, especially when each role was equally formulaic.
