The role Billy Bob Thornton refused to play for one highly specific reason: “I’m going to look like Dan Aykroyd”
On paper, and in every respect, really, there’s absolutely nothing in common between Billy Bob Thornton and Dan Aykroyd. And yet, the spectre of the latter loomed so large that the former felt he had no choice but to turn down the role of one of modern history’s most contentious figures.
In one corner, there’s Thornton, who spent his youth living in the backwoods of rural Arkansas before grinding his way to relevancy as the Academy Award-winning screenwriter behind Sling Blade, an Oscar-nominated performance he created for himself because he was told he’d never make it as an actor.
In the other, there’s Aykroyd, who broke through as an original Saturday Night Live cast member after cutting his teeth on the Canadian comedy circuit, which set the stage for his ascension to becoming one of mainstream comedy’s most recognisable faces in films like The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, Trading Places, and Spies Like Us.
Their paths couldn’t have been more different, and it was Aykroyd’s comedy stylings that convinced Thornton that agreeing to play a real-life person who’d been mined for drama and comedy in equal measure for decades had the potential to turn him into either a joke or a caricature.
For the most part, Thornton has avoided playing far-fetched or fantastical characters. While he’s been in some mindless blockbusters, including Armageddon, Eagle Eye, and The Gray Man, he’s always cast as either a government official or a high-ranking authority figure because he knows it would be ridiculous to play anything else.
He rarely plays well-known historical figures either, and when he did, The Alamo became one of the biggest box office bombs in history. He did play the President of the United States once, though, which he might have regretted when Hugh Grant tortured him over his bizarre phobia of Benjamin Disraeli’s facial hair.
When the opportunity arose to combine a presidential role with a historical basis, Thornton was thoroughly unconvinced. “I’m known for playing all these different things, but at the end of the day, they’re all what I would be in that case,” he explained to Texas Monthly. “I was asked once to play Nixon. I said, ‘If I do Nixon, I’m going to look like Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live. It’ll be an impression.”
Plenty of actors have played Nixon on film and television, including Anthony Hopkins, Frank Langella, John Cusack, and even Rob Brydon, but the only thing Thornton could think of when he was offered the gig was Aykroyd’s recurring SNL skit, which saw him play the disgraced commander-in-chief on multiple episodes throughout the late 1970s.
It’s easy to say that Thornton would be all wrong for ‘Tricky Dicky’ because he looks nothing like him, but Hopkins was hardly his spitting image, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts. He’s talented enough to pull it off, but in the end, his reluctance was down to what’s surely the only case in recorded history where an actor refused to play a role because of something Aykroyd had done decades previously.
