The TV show that convinced Billy Bob Thornton to quit drugs: “What an asshole you are”
Billy Bob Thornton has had quite the life. The son of a woman who proclaimed to be a psychic, he turned to a career in entertainment after a promising future as a baseball player was ruled out due to an injury. He broke through with the 1996 film Sling Blade, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, before finding a steady stream of success in pictures big and small. He’s won an Oscar, released several albums of music, and been married six times, including to Angelina Jolie.
Such a turbulent personal life has had its consequences. Thornton suffered from heart issues as a young man, brought on by his diet. He’s had his struggles with alcohol and drugs, too, admitting to being ‘blind drunk’ on the set of Bad Santa. It wasn’t until a random encounter with a classic sitcom that made the star change his ways.
During an interview with Playboy, he talked about his early 20s, which he admitted was his most drug-heavy period. He confessed to being on pretty much everything at the time, with no preference one way or the other. When the interviewer asked him why he stopped, he gave a typically strange answer.
“I was watching The Honeymooners on a little black-and-white television with some friends in this trailer,” he said. “Jackie Gleason started doing things in the show that I knew damn well he could not have been doing in the show”. These hallucinations got worse and worse, to the point where Thornton knew he had to get out of there. “I stepped outside the trailer, and it seemed like a 12-foot drop. I went to the car, but the hood seemed only about a foot long, while the rest of the car seemed as if it went down the block. I thought, ‘If I could only get in the backseat, I’ll be OK’. One of those nights of too many mixtures of drugs. It wasn’t the worst experience I’d ever had, but I thought, ‘What an asshole you are’. I stopped.”
It plays a relatively small part in the story of Thornton getting sober, but it is worth going over what The Honeymooners is for those of you under the age of 90. Created by its star, Jackie Gleason, the series focused on the lives of Gleason’s Ralph and Alice Kramden, played by Audrey Meadows, a working-class couple in Brooklyn. Despite its brief existence, the show had a major impact on pop culture. You might be aware of Gleason’s catchphrase “To the moon!”, which, to paraphrase Futurama, used ‘space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife’. It hasn’t aged particularly well.
The series has contributed to society in other, less unfortunate ways, too. It was one of the first TV shows to portray ordinary people in a positive light, paving the way for other sitcoms to follow the same formula. It’s also responsible for the title of Johnny Thunders’ classic punk song “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”, one of Bob Dylan’s favourites.
From cheering up Bob Dylan to inspiring jokes on Futurama to helping Billy Bob Thornton get clean, the legacy of The Honeymooners continues to evolve in new and interesting ways.
