The 2006 role Billy Bob Thornton was born to play: “Here it is, right in my lap”
Call it fate, destiny, luck, coincidence, or anything else you want, but actors have a funny habit of ending up playing the role they’ve been waiting for their entire life. It took Billy Bob Thornton a while to get his, but he landed it eventually, even if the end result was resounding mediocrity.
If there’s a role closest to the real-life Thornton, then it’s probably Landman‘s Tommy Norris, which makes sense when creator Taylor Sheridan wrote the script with him in mind, before he’d even been offered the part. As effortless as it is to get into that character’s mindset, that wasn’t the one he was born to play.
Having weathered an early storm of typecasting, which was inevitable when he’s about as Southern as Southern gets in mainstream Hollywood terms, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter’s versatility was what set him apart from the rest of the chasing pack, even if he’s not the guy you’d necessarily call upon to play a romantic lead, or even attempt an accent that isn’t his own.
Making the most of the ‘one for me, one for them’ mindset, he’s alternated between passion and prestige projects like The Man Who Wasn’t There, Sling Blade, All the Pretty Horses, One False Move, A Simple Plan, and The Apostle to mindless fare like Eagle Eye, Faster, and that “two-hour piece of trash,” Armageddon.
The highest-grossing release of 1998 is the closest thing he’s ever made to a conventional sci-fi flick, unless you want to count his voice-only contribution to Netflix’s The Electric State, and it’s fine if you don’t, since that movie cost $300 million to produce and was released in March 2025, even though you’ve completely forgotten it was even a thing that existed until right now.
However, he did make a sci-fi-tinged drama in 2006, with Thornton headlining co-writer and director Michael Polish’s The Astronaut Farmer, a fairly self-explanatory tale about a former Air Force pilot and Texas rancher who takes it upon himself to build a rocket capable of reaching outer space from the confines of his barn.
“This is the kind of role I always wanted to play,” he said at the time. “I’ve played guys that are kind of like this, but in different sorts of movies. I’ve played guys from Texas, or whatever, but they are usually edgier movies, in other words. It’s like, ‘You know what? You’ve always wanted to do one of these, and here it is, right in my lap’. It’s amazing, because every actor has a list of things they want to do.”
On Thornton’s list was playing Davy Crockett, which he did in 2004’s The Alamo, which tanked at the box office. He also wanted to “do my Jimmy Stewart movie, basically” and emulate Mr Smith Goes to Washington in one way or another, and when he read the script for The Astronaut Farmer: “There it was, you know? You feel good coming out of there.”
The downside to leading the film he’d always dreamed of leading was that, much like The Alamo, The Astronaut Farmer was also a flop. Not on the same scale, as you’d expect from a picture that cost ten times less to produce, but it still didn’t manage to recoup its modest $13 million budget from theatres. Thornton was happy with it, though, which is all that mattered to him.
