“This movie fucking sucks”: the role Billy Bob Thornton loathed every minute of playing
There can’t be many things worse for an actor than turning up for work every day in the knowledge that they’re making something shite, but at least Billy Bob Thornton had an ally who felt the same way.
It’s still a first-world problem, though, since stars of the Academy Award-winning screenwriter’s calibre aren’t being paid a pittance for making crap films, so it’s not as if they’re earning minimum wage to show up for a job they fucking hate, a situation that millions of people have had to endure.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult for a thespian to put on a brave face for the cameras, and at least try to convince the audience that they weren’t miserable from the first day of shooting to the last. Thornton is one of those names that can’t be accused of phoning it in, but some turds can’t be polished.
He called Michael Bay’s Armageddon a “two-hour piece of trash” that he admitted he only made for the money because he’d recently added another divorce to his collection, and as faint a compliment as it is, his exposition-heavy role still saw him give one of the best performances in the film, not that anyone went to see it for the nuanced dramatics, regardless of how impressively stacked the ensemble was.
On the other side of the coin, Craig Gillespie’s Mr Woodcock, where Thornton played the titular abrasive coach, was one of those unpolishable turds. The director knew he’d made a stinker, to the point that he quit the picture after it had been rejected by test screenings, with David Dobkin brought in to oversee rewrites and reshoots.
He was still the filmmaker credited on the spectacularly shoddy comedy, leaving him to take the brunt of the blame even after Dobkin’s late-stage attempts to save it yielded the same results. As for the cast, Seann William Scott revealed that he and Thornton did their best to try to make light of a bad situation.
“We’d rip on Woodcock,” he confessed. “We’d be like, ‘This movie fucking sucks so bad.'” They were right, and the fact that those were the conversations the American Pie alum and Thornton were having on their way to set, during their downtime between scenes, and after the day’s shooting had wrapped says it all about how they both knew they were onto a hiding.
At least Thornton had veteran status on his side, with Scott sharing his genuine fear that Mr Woodcock would turn out to be such a disaster that it would be the death of him. “There’s nothing worse than going to a movie set, knowing that this could end my career,” he ominously intoned, but at least it didn’t come to that.
Despite the two leads and the director all being fully aware that they were creating something truly terrible, the so-called comedy didn’t die a death at the box office. It wasn’t a hit, but it did recoup its budget and then some, which probably left Thornton, Scott, and Gillespie scratching their heads, wondering why so many people were willing to pay to see it.
