Billy Bob Thornton isn’t Southern enough?
Please…
Landman’s second act is set to release this Sunday, on November 16th, almost exactly a year after the show’s first season. The star-studded cast of Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, Andy Garcia, Sam Elliott, Ali Larter, Jacob Lofland, and Michelle Randolph will return for Season two of the beloved show, and I’m sure it will be just as wild as the first season… Taylor Sheridan knows drama, that’s for sure.
The second season’s official synopsis implies that a boiling point will be reached one way or another as Thornton’s crisis executive and “fixer” Tommy Norris will certainly be forced to put out some fires:
“As oil rises from the earth, so do secrets – and Tommy Norris’s (Thornton) breaking point may be closer than he realizes. Facing mounting pressure from M-Tex Oil, Cami Miller (Moore), and the shadow of his kin, survival in West Texas isn’t noble – it’s brutal. And sooner or later something’s got to break.”
Of course, Thornton, who plays Tommy Norris, is an absolute star and makes the show what it is, but the entire cast is absolutely great, and Thornton said in a recent interview that his relationship with his on-screen wife Angela, played by Ali Larter, is actually pretty accurate to their real life friendship in many ways, if you can believe it…
But long before Landman became a hit show, Thornton was an A list Hollywood celebrity, who of course famously married Angelina Jolie. They married in 2000 and stayed together until 2002, after first meeting on set of the film Pushing Tin in 1999. I still think about the necklaces they wore containing vials of each other’s blood… it seems like he’s come a long way since then.
But of course, if Angelina Jolie tells a man they need to wear her blood around their neck, they’re going to do it…
Thornton has been doing tons of rounds of press for the forthcoming season of Landman, and during an interview with Fox News Digital, he recalled his early years fresh to LA from his home state of Arkansas, where he was born and raised, and how there was a prejudice in Hollywood towards Southern actors. He explained that a “guy from the Bronx can play a guy from Mississippi… but a guy from Mississippi can’t really play a guy from the Bronx,” mostly due to the stereotypes many in California had about people from the South, especially back then, but I’m sure they still exist today too to a certain extent.
Ironically, Thornton had actually auditioned for a film to play a guy who was “just off the turnip truck” to California from Alabama, but he was told he wasn’t Southern enough… though at the time, he himself was “just off the turnip truck from Arkansas,” as he puts it. The best part of the story is when Thornton pokes fun at himself and where he’s from, saying it was so bad, he couldn’t even “get a part as a hillbilly,” though that’s exactly how people thought of him there… of course, all of that changes once you become as successful as he is:
“A guy from the Bronx can play a guy from Mississippi in the movies, I’ve found over the years. But a guy from Mississippi can’t really play a guy from the Bronx. There was a certain prejudice with Southern actors for a long time.
I actually did an audition one for a student film, and they told me I wasn’t Southern enough. And I was like, you know, it was about a guy from Alabama just off the turnip truck in California. And I said, ‘Well, I actually am just off the turnip truck from Arkansas.’ It’s like, what do you mean?
Once you’re successful, I could walk into Universal Studios and say I wanna play Betty Davis, and they’d go, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good idea.’ And then when I was coming up, I couldn’t get a part as a hillbilly.”
Hollywood…
I’m sure there’s still some bias towards people in certain parts of the country when it comes to movie producers in LA, but Thornton has had an incredibly successful career in spite of that, and he shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The Season 2 trailer is available to watch below.
