The 1929 movie that gave Billy Bob Thornton a lifelong phobia: “That’s how the whole thing started”
Imagine sitting down to eat your dinner, putting on a movie to watch, and then instantly developing a phobia that you have to deal with for the rest of your life. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, not if you’re Billy Bob Thornton, because he’s been traumatised ever since.
The actor and filmmaker is afraid of a lot of strange things, ranging from silver cutlery to Komodo dragons, and he also suggested that watching My Little Pony with his daughter gave him a fresh insight into the Jonestown massacre, so it’s fair to say that he’s an odd fella.
He’d have been much better off keeping this particular phobia to himself, though, because he made the mistake of saying too much about it, which caused him to be re-traumatised all over again decades later when he was making a movie within the vicinity of the very thing that had scarred him for life.
On the surface, a 1929 film that made history at the Academy Awards is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it made history at the Academy Awards several times over, so its place in the annals of Oscars lore has been secured for almost a century, but Thornton will always rue the day he went channel-hopping and got so much more than he could have ever bargained for.
By winning ‘Best Actor’ for his leading performance, George Arliss became the first British thespian to win an Oscar, and he also became the first person to do it in a remake, not to mention the first to do it while reprising a role they’d played before in the 1921 version. Thornton couldn’t give a shit, though, because director Alfred E Green’s Disraeli was the stuff of nightmares.
“I was starving and about to eat my TV dinner when I switched channels and, just for a second, saw this guy, George Arliss, who was playing Disraeli,” the Boxmasters man recalled. “He had this big old weird face and teeth and that creepy wispy hair sticking back like Larry from the Three Stooges. And the set showed heavy drapes and those big old chairs and a stone-looking table.”
It sounds fairly innocuous, but Thornton “couldn’t eat my TV dinner just from seeing that; I switched the channel right off the bat.” Still, despite averting his eyes elsewhere, the spectre of Arliss’ take on the former Prime Minister continued to loom large: “Later on, I was able to eat my TV dinner, but it was ruined at that point,” he added. “So that’s how that whole Benjamin Disraeli thing started.”
Just like that, he was terrified of Disraeli. Not so much the mention of his name, but the image he had in his head of the 19th-century politician sitting in a darkened room, sporting facial hair that was so unsettling that it forced Thornton to abandon his TV dinner and wait until he’d recovered before eating it.
It’s a niche phobia, to say the least, but it still came back to bite him when, on the Downing Street set of Love Actually, Hugh Grant caught wind of his co-star’s phobia and chased him around the set with a portrait of Disraeli for shits and giggles.
