The “very, very heavy” movie Billy Bob Thornton can’t believe he made: “Wow, I was in that, huh?”
Given it’s not far off when we can be all excited about opening presents and sitting around the telly saying funny things like “Oh my god I’m so full” and “Why didn’t you get me literally anything I wanted?” our attention can turn to which Christmas movies we’ll watch this year. And one that tends to go under the radar a bit is Bad Santa starring Billy Bob Thornton.
It’s a 2003 crime comedy caper that you feel like probably, for many different reasons, wouldn’t get made these days, but that doesn’t stop it from being wildly entertaining, and Thornton is fantastically grumpy as an absolute mess of a man who dresses up like Santa Claus in order to rob people blind.
Bad Santa is a redemption story as befits most Christmas classics, it just happens to do it in a way that’s packed full of profanity, nastiness and political incorrectness, described by some as “Miracle on 34th Street’s evil twin,” which pretty much sums it up. Thornton brought the character back for a sequel in 2016, but by then, it already felt like it was the wrong era, and the movie did not do well at all.
Back in the early 2000s when he first slipped the red suit on however, Thornton was very much at the top of his game, papped all over the planet thanks to his relationship with fellow movie star Angelina Jolie, he was much in demand by Hollywood too as a result of his Oscar win for the 1996 movie Sling Blade, which he wrote, directed and starred in.
It tells the gritty story of a man with mental health problems who is released from hospital after serving many years of detention for killing his mother and her lover, going on to form a bond with a boy whose father committed suicide. Thornton adapted his Academy Award-winning screenplay from a one-man show he had written, and the movie was a massive success, bringing in more than $30m on a budget of just over a million.
The exposure led to his being cast in major Hollywood movies, including 1998’s Armageddon with Bruce Willis and Matt Damon, and he picked up a second ‘Best Actor Oscar’ nomination for the thriller A Simple Plan the same year. Over the next couple of years, he wrote and directed two more films before he took on a role in a movie that would prove hugely controversial opposite Halle Berry – 2001’s Monster’s Ball.
The story of Thornton’s corrections officer who begins a relationship with the wife of a man he helped execute, the standard of the movie was arguably overlooked by one of the most explicit sex scenes ever filmed for a mainstream film between Berry and Thornton, which even to this day has people asking whether or not they did the deed for real.
That may have contributed to some degree to the film becoming so successful, bringing in ten times its budget at the box office, but the performances are certainly of the highest order, a fact reflected by Berry winning ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for the film. The subject matter does not make for easy viewing, dealing with abject grief, racism and primal lust. As Thornton said at the time:
“It’s a very, very heavy movie and I saw it the other day. It’s a very good movie. It’s one of those that when it was over, I was like, ‘Wow, I was in that, huh?’”
