The golden age of television is upon us… and Billy Bob Thornton has come to realize that in the past decade or so.
Why do I say that? Well, it’s not just because TV seems to be captivating the consumer more than movies in the modern day. Nor can it be solely attributed to sophisticated, episodic dramas like Breaking Bad and Succession having a ton of success. The main reason why there’s a belief in modern television? The stars are lining up to be featured on the small screen instead of the silver screen.
For the longest time, Hollywood’s biggest names saw acting in television shows as a step down from what they were doing in filmmaking. There were TV stars, and there were movie stars, and there was a distinct line in between. Sure, TV stars could graduate to the big screen, but Hollywood’s finest would never go “slumming” on television sets. Billy Bob Thornton explained to The Hollywood Reporter that he was one of the actors that believed that to be true, even as those around him tried to say media was moving away from movie theaters and towards television screens:
“My manager kept telling me, ‘Dude, this is where it’s headed. You don’t understand … These are long-form movies and it’s where the future is.”
Thornton says he turned plenty of TV roles down in the 2000s, and admits that a number of them went on to have great success. But that didn’t matter to him, because at the time, the Sling Blade actor had to make sure that he didn’t tarnish his resume with a TV series. It was movies or bust for Billy Bob Thornton… until he realized it didn’t have to be that way:
“(I was) late to the party. Because when I was growing up, TV was a bad word to movie actors. So I resisted forever. The first thing I did was the first season of ‘Fargo,’ and once I did Fargo, I said, ‘Oh, okay, I get it. I totally understand now.'”
Thornton’s first entry into the television sphere was Fargo in 2014. From there, he went on to star in many other successful series, like Amazon’s Goliath (from 2016 to 2021), and most recently, the hit Paramount+ show Landman. It’s hard to imagine the Taylor Sheridan show without Thornton at the helm, but if there hadn’t been a shift in Hollywood that let actors and actresses be more comfortable in television, we might have gotten a very different version of Tommy Norris.
Hell, we may not have even gotten a Landman show at all.
It just goes to show how quickly things can change. Now, Thornton is just one of many big-time names getting comfortable in roles on TV and streaming. And when Thornton eventually did a 180 on the whole thing, he was proclaiming that he had been wrong to the whole world. Around the time he joined onto the cast of Fargo, Thornton – who previously swore off starring in TV – proclaimed that a role in television was the way to go:
“The entertainment business can pretend all they want, but the movie world has changed drastically, particularly in the last five or six years. If you want to be an actor, get on a really good series in television because there’s where it’s at.”
And since it’s been many years since he said that, it might be appropriate now to insert “Taylor Sheridan” into that quote. A “really good Taylor Sheridan series” seems to be a gold mine for all of the esteemed actors and actresses out there.
