UK Edition
Billy Bob Thornton, a staple of good-to-great American films 20-odd years ago, has not exactly gone into hiding, but the 66-year-old’s film career is in a curious state. He appears in this week’s Netflix action romp The Gray Man – ill-fatedly – as one Donald Fitzroy, the handler of Ryan Gosling’s character.
Secret service men, politicians, spin-doctors and soldiers have become Thornton’s bread and butter, but these besuited stiffs, who pop up every year or two in generally underperforming pictures, might just as well be all called Donald Fitzroy. He’s become a kind of twilight actor in interchangeable parts.
What happened? Thornton was the toast of Hollywood in 1996, thanks to the promotional push his writing-directing debut Sling Blade (1996) got from Miramax, the same year as The English Patient. The role he’d written for himself, Karl Childers, would be a tough sell in the current climate: Karl was an abused, intellectually disabled loner in Arkansas, who developed paternal feelings for a 12-year-old boy played by Lucas Black, and intervened in a fateful, ultimately heroic way in another family’s crisis.
Thornton was Oscar-nominated for Best Actor that year and won Best Adapted Screenplay. At 41, and already at the tail end of his fourth marriage, his star was finally rising. He’d had bitty roles since the mid-1980s, and deserved more acclaim for co-writing and co-starring in the phenomenal One False Move (1992), Carl Franklin’s still-underrated neo-noir, which gave Bill Paxton his best ever role as a hicksville cop with everything to prove.
Thornton’s scripts were full of grit and pain: they connected in glancing ways with his brutal-sounding backwoods upbringing, which saw him beaten repeatedly by his father from the age, as he remembers it, “of three or four” – a legacy of pain which has stamped him with acute OCD ever since.
The re-pairing of Paxton and Thornton on Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998) was just one of the highlights of Thornton’s post-Sling-Blade jamboree, netting him another nomination. As a thinly disguised version of Clinton’s campaign-runner James Carville in Primary Colors (1998), he was bang on the money, and he became the first port of call as the guy you might stick in a control room – the Ed Harris, if you like – in a Michael Bay joint such as Armageddon (also 1998).
His fifth marriage, by his own admission, made him feel like the supporting player, not the star, but only because the wife in question was Angelina Jolie, experiencing her own meteoric ascent. Lucky, then, that a handful of chunky leading roles were lined up for Thornton, and he hardly put a foot wrong in any of these, from Monster’s Ball (2001) to Bandits (2001) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), to a very contrasting pair of sports coaches, in Friday Night Lights (2004) and Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears (2005). (Thornton’s own dad was a baseball coach.)
I don’t share the general reverence for Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), with its sour tone and sarcastic plundering of ClassicFM staples. But Thornton invested a perfect fatigue and self-loathing in that part, too.
At a certain point – it’s hard to say when, exactly – the perception of Thornton as a huge oddball off-screen started to take over from appreciation of his often exceptional craft. The intensity of the Jolie years definitely contributed to this. The couple famously wore each other’s blood in vials around their necks, bought his ‘n’ hers grave plots, and talked frequently of their padded sex room. It was a lot, especially when this eternal bond was sundered so soon, supposedly because Jolie couldn’t handle Thornton’s temper.
Traces of that rage, to say the least, surfaced in a notorious interview Thornton did in 2009, when he was promoting a tour for his fledgling rock band, The Boxmasters, on CBC radio in Toronto. The audio went viral because of his surly, hostile responses, especially when the host saw fit to mention his acting and writing credits, which Thornton remarked were meant to be verboten – even though The Boxmasters had formed a mere two years earlier.
Thornton has also made mention of some of his more unusual phobias over the years, and now has to deal with these every time he’s interviewed. These include Komodo dragons (“when they bite you, you instantly go blind”), plastic cutlery, silver cutlery, and antique furniture. “It’s that French/English/Scottish old mildewy stuff,” he clarified once to the New York Times. “Old dusty heavy drapes and big tables with lions’ heads carved in it. Stuff that kings were around.”
Is he simply too weird to work with, these days? That doesn’t seem to be a problem for, say, Joaquin Phoenix. Perhaps Thornton’s eccentric brand of creativity feels past its sell-by date, and his behind-the-camera record since the 1990s has cost him a certain amount of pulling power. (The eye-watering financial failure of The Alamo (2004) can’t have helped, either.)
In 2000, Thornton spent a fortune adapting Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses for Columbia and Miramax. Harvey Weinstein hated his original cut, which he insisted had to be rescored altogether and have an hour cut out of it, a process which Matt Damon, eternally dismayed about the film’s treatment, says took a harsh toll on Thornton mentally. (“It really f_____ him up.”)
That bombed, then his next film as a director, the comedy-drama Daddy & Them (2001), got limited support from Miramax, and the one after that, Jayne Mansfield’s Car (2013), has barely been seen by anybody.
Despite this rocky ride through the industry of late, Thornton has so much talent that you have to wonder where the leading roles – barring four seasons of the legal drama Goliath for Amazon TV – have gone. Here’s hoping he might do a little better than next year’s Donald Fitzroy, whoever that might be.
Billy Bob Thornton’s oddball brilliance deserves better than The Gray Man
Sling Blade made him a sensation, then his eccentricities – and Angelina Jolie – took over. Will Hollywood ever know what to do with him?