Billy Bob Thorton: The Hillbilly Orson Welles

by David Geffner | Published September 2, 1998

He wears his redneck roots like a crown and wields his Deep South eccentricities like a saber, but Billy Bob Thornton reckons he’s been feeling mighty Canadian lately. The Arkansas native and Oscar-winner for his breakthrough Southern Gothic fable Sling Blade recently spent four months in Toronto for the Mike Newell-directed black comedy Pushing Tin, which stars Thornton and John Cusack as stressed-out air traffic controllers trying to circumvent imminent insanity. Think M*A*S*H meets Airport ’75.

Thornton, of course, gained renown for playing off-kilter hillbillies, like Karl “Mmm-Hmmm” Childers, the simpleton savant who kills with "what some folks call a sling blade,” and the grease-fried sloth of a mechanic who terrorizes Sean Penn in Oliver Stone's U-Turn. So when producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, The Rock) asked Thornton to play - literally - a rocket scientist in this summer's second asteroid-colliding-with-Earth apocalyptic opus Armageddon, Thornton was dumbfounded. His character is the sanest voice in a movie about a bunch of roughneck oil rig workers - Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi - recruited to drill and then detonate a nuclear device in the doomsday asteroid. “It was just so strange they came to me for that role," shrugs Thornton, 42, who is the figurative rock at NASA's Mission Control guiding this ragtag team of space cadet yahoos. “I figured if they had that much confidence in me to do this, that's not bad.”

Thornton questioned whether taking this $140 million FX extravaganza would be viewed as selling out his indie cachet. "To be honest, it's inevitable when you have any success that you’ll be offered this kind of movie...it just always happens,” he reasons. “Actually, I was offered four or five of these kinds of movies at once, and most of them were pure junk. But what was interesting to me was that Jerry and [director] Michael Bay decided not to have the usual mainstream usual suspects in a blockbuster action film. They wanted me and Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson (Bottle Rocket) and people like that. That appealed to me.”

Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob, and John Ritter yak it up in Sling Blade (1996).

Apparently so did the Jerry Bruckheimer-trademark flag-waving. “I actually reacted to the heavy patriotic nature of the movie, which has been sort of a dirty word in the last couple of decades,” states Thornton. “I think a little patriotism seems like a good thing right now.

“And believe it or not,” continues Thornton, “this character, who puts his faith in these morons sent up to space, was an interesting turn for me. ’Cause quite frankly, as an actor, it’s more of a stretch for me to play a normal guy. That is much more difficult for me to do. It's far easier to play freaky characters...I mean as a person who grew up being low man on a totem pole, I feel closer to those kinds of characters. Here I was playing a guy who actually runs everything. I’ve never run anything in my life."

Thornton has indeed come a long way from rural Alpine, Arkansas (pop. 100), where he grew up penniless and hungry, eating whatever his forest ranger grandfather “shot in the woods - possum, deer meat, and such.” His mother was “the main person who encouraged me to become whatever I wanted to be,” he says. After graduating from high school, where he’d gotten involved in theatre, Thornton went to work - hauling hay, laboring at a screen-door factory, and playing in local R&B bands. After driving to L.A. in 1981 with only $500 to his name, Thornton struggled as a rock & roll singer and drummer, subsisting on nothing but potatoes for a while, which soon landed him in the hospital for heart failure brought on by malnutrition. “I knew a few people, but I was too ashamed to ask them for money,” he says softly. “I went through a couple of weeks where I actually didn’t eat anything."

Eventually Thornton decided to try some acting classes and landed a small part in the 1987 HBO movie The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains. “Val Kilmer had a real part, and I was envious that I only had five lines,” recalls Thornton. “My life was going by and nothing was happening.”

It was then that the seeds for his career-making Sling Blade were sowed. “I started making fun of myself in the mirror at lunch, literally making faces and calling myself names.” He lowered his voice, and covered his upper lip with his lower one, like the patients he remembered from the nursing home where he worked in the ’70s. “I ended up coming up with Karl Childers right there. It was a little bit of a cosmic deal.” For nearly the next 10 years, Thornton honed Karl’s eerie monologue as part of a one-man stage show and later in a 25-minute short film he created. Meanwhile, he was scoring roles in, among other movies, 1992s One False Move (which he co-wrote), Indecent Proposal, and in the early ’90s, a sitcom called “Hearts Afire,” playing opposite future Sling Blade co-star John Ritter.

All the while, Sling Blade was still hacking away at Thornton's psyche, and finally he scored financial backing to write, direct and star in a feature version of his short film. Miramax quickly purchased the project for $10 million and signed Thornton to a three-picture deal. Thornton began directing and starring in his next film, a black comedy set in Little Rock about “family, lack of communication and alcoholism,” which he wrote and hopes will further counteract what he sees as Hollywood’s steady stream of American South stereotypes. “It's a terrible thing to go to a movie and see a caricature. I think a lot of it is because there weren’t many filmmakers from the South early on. And so you got guys from the Bronx and California making movies about Mississippi, butchering Southern dialects.”

It’s an artistic responsibility Thornton takes seriously, but not to extremes. “Look, I'm certainly not claiming the South's any better than anywhere else, or a better place to make a movie about, but it does have a real knack for scandal and I think that’s a wonderful thing to explore. So movies about the South shouldn’t just be about how great it is. Part of the interesting thing is how screwed up it is, too."

Thornton as the demented mechanic U-Turn (1997).

“I mean I tell ya, if you went by Hollywood’s idea of Southern movies, you’d think all that happens down there is lynchings,” he adds. “I used to start out a show I did in theatre by saying, ‘OK, y’all know my name’s Billy Bob, so you probably think I married my cousin and screw goats.’ But I also said, ‘Just remember this: if it weren’t for us, you wouldn't have a great deal of your literature, and you wouldn't have any music.’ Because modern music comes from the South of the United States. Without it, all we’d have would be classical music and polkas.”

Thornton, whose pal Robert Duvall affectionately dubbed him “The Hillbilly Orson Welles,” remains evasive about who will co-star in his next feature, “only because, as you know from Sling Blade, I like to surprise audiences with people they don't recognize at first. A lot of them are friends of mine and not all of them are necessarily known for being in the acting profession.” And the other reason, says Thornton, “is because none of it’s formalized yet; I like to do things simply on a handshake. I know who I want, and they know I want them, so it's just a phone call away.”

Names being tossed around include Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Thornton talked with “way before Titanic.” But can Thornton’s small-scale budget handle DiCaprio's new $21 million price tag? “Oh, I can afford him - he’ll work cheap for me,” insists Thornton with a laugh. After that, Thornton will direct the much-anticipated All The Pretty Horses, scheduled to lens in March with Matt Damon starring. “I mean, yeah, All The Pretty Horses is a big monster of a movie, but I’ll use people I like and I'm friends with and I know they’re going to do the job and not have a lot of demands or weird personality problems, so we can just have fun.”

I LIKE HOW YOU TALK: Thornton and Lucas Black in Sling Blade (1996).

One thing’s for certain: whatever role Thornton tackles next, he will assuredly morph into yet another unrecognizable creation. Whether it’s Sling Blade, U-Turn or Primary Colors, Thornton refuses to embody the same look twice. “I'd kill myself if I had to do that,” laughs Thornton, who is quite slim these days, having shed the 50 pounds he gained for U-Turn. “If I had to just be myself, it would be pretty stressful...I just wouldn't have as much confidence as an actor. Armageddon was hard enough for me, because I was more normal looking without much of a mask. That’s what really intimidates me. I got into acting to play anyone but me.

And that even includes cartoon characters, namely “King of the Hill,” which Thornton admits is his favorite TV show. “I called Mike Judge recently and said, “I've got to be on ‘King of the Hill’ - how come you haven’t asked me?” And he said, “Are you serious? I didn't think you'd want to do crap like that!” And I said, “Of course I'm serious.” So when I was in Toronto, they sent me to a studio and I recorded my part with Mike Judge giving me direction on the phone. I play a preacher whose fallen from grace on the show.”

But Thornton insists that contrary to rumors circulating, he will not be reprising his role of Karl Childers for a Sling Blade sequel. "I was even approached about doing a Sling Blade TV series, to which I said, “I don't even like movie sequels, and I surely don’'t like TV stuff, and I would never even consider it.

“But there were actually two proposals for Karl that I thought were kind of amusing, and I certainly gave them credit for trying," chuckles Thornton. “The first was a Karl comic book, where Karl was a superhero who travels to a different town every week and saves another family, kind of like The Incredible Hulk. That was one where I actually thought for about five minutes, ‘Hmmm, I wonder?’

“And the other was a Karl doll, where you pull the string and he says, ‘Hey, I’m going to whack your head off' or he says 'I want more mustard and biscuits.’ That one was almost sick enough to actually do.” MM