Billy Bob Thornton shrugs when I ask why exactly he plays so many Texans. Wearing that perennially you-know-what-eating grin, he takes a drag on his American Spirit. “If you’re from the South, you must be from Texas, right?” he says, imitating clueless film executives.
That doesn’t quite explain it, because he’s got the locals fooled too. “Billy Bob’s Texan, ain’t he?” one good ol’ boy asked into the crowd of good ol’ boys and girls. We’re packed into Main Street Crossing, in Tomball, thirty miles northwest of downtown Houston, to hear Thornton sing with his rock band, the Boxmasters. The pearl-snapped fan took Thornton’s Texanness almost on faith, mentioned in between telling tales of decades spent riding bulls and of seeing George Strait before he was King George.
You could forgive him for the mistake: Though Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and raised in nearby Malvern, he has long been one of Hollywood’s default on-screen Texans. Country-fried yet streetwise, fiercely independent but old-school, the actor, director, musician, and screenwriter projects the traits we want to believe we do too.
The 69-year-old has played beloved Texas characters including Permian High School coach Gary Gaines in the film version of Friday Night Lights and Davy Crockett in The Alamo. Now he’s originating another: Tommy Norris, the titular landman in Yellowstone creator (and Texan) Taylor Sheridan’s new Paramount+ series, which debuts November 17. (Landman is based on Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment’s podcast Boomtown, and TM is an executive producer.) Thornton’s character is an oil-industry fixer tasked with bridging the gap between the roughnecks in the West Texas fields and the shiny-booted executives who rely on them.
Thornton refuses to stretch himself to fit far-fetched roles—his turn as the U.S. president in Love Actually notwithstanding—instead digging into characters that he feels he can inhabit truthfully. “I’m known for playing all these different things, but at the end of the day, they’re all what I would be in that case,” he says. “I was asked once to play Nixon. I said, ‘If I do Nixon, I’m going to look like Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live. It’ll be an impression.’ ”
Waiting for the Boxmasters show to begin, he looks like someone Nixon would be terrified of. We’re sitting on the porch of the cottage that serves as the venue’s greenroom, and he’s wearing a black Dodgers hat, black jeans, and a black henley that’s unbuttoned nearly to the navel, with the sleeves cut off to display his ink. Other accessories include a Bud Light that is replaced a couple times during our conversation and a pack of those American Spirits, which explains why Thornton is sitting outdoors in suburban Houston in early September, chain-smoking in weather that he describes as “soupy.”
He’s comfortable here, outside a venue where his band plays regularly. Thornton lived (and got his first tattoo) in Tomball before he moved to L.A., in 1981, back when he was trying to hack it as a musician while working at his bandmate’s father’s construction-equipment rental company. His biggest success during that period came as the drummer in a ZZ Top cover band called Tres Hombres. “Billy Gibbons called us the best little cover band in Texas,” Thornton says proudly, adding that the iconic Houston rocker is now one of his best friends. His Lone Star ties aren’t all flashy—he’s also spent plenty of time with extended family in North Texas. Today he’s an empty nester living with his sixth wife in Southern California, and he requires little prompting to gush about his children: “She’s the intellectual,” he says of his youngest, Bella, who just started college. “We’re so proud of her.”
His first experience shooting in Texas was in Abilene, where he filmed The Stars Fell on Henrietta (1995) alongside Robert Duvall—another non-Texan who often gets claimed by the Lone Star State as its own. “There’s something about [acting in Texas] that automatically feels like you’re authentic when you’re doing it,” Thornton says. “It’s an authentic state.”
His early-aughts portrayals of Davy Crockett and Coach Gaines consolidated his Texanness in the public imagination. His take on Crockett, if not quite as enduring as Friday Night Lights, is important to him. A group of Texas historians told him he’d created the most accurate and best on-screen portrayal of Crockett that exists. Gaines was an easier task in some ways—Thornton’s father was a high school basketball coach—and harder in others. “Gary Gaines told me, ‘I don’t really curse,’ ” Thornton says, remembering a preshoot phone call with the legendary Permian High coach. “I said, ‘Well, that will certainly be a departure.’ ”
For Landman, Thornton returned to Odessa, where Friday Night Lights was shot, and even to Permian’s stadium, where all of the movie’s game footage had been filmed. “I got a chill when I walked in,” he says. “It was just as I remembered it, and I saw young [Landman] extras whose mom or dad were extras in Friday Night Lights.” Off camera, he stepped into the locker room to reprise one of his famous pep talks for the players. Everywhere he went in Odessa, he encountered old friends—including one local bartender.
His road back to West Texas ran through the Yellowstone cinematic universe: Thornton’s knockout cameo as a swaggering lawman in the prequel series, 1883, inspired Sheridan to give him his own franchise. “I’m writing a show for you,” he told Thornton at the 1883 premiere, right around the time Sheridan was working with former Texas Monthly staffer Christian Wallace, the host of the Boomtown podcast, to create Landman. “I’d never seen any kind of movie about the oil business that was really in-depth,” Thornton says now. (Landman, he says, is “like a ten-hour movie.”)
Though Landman’s cast includes Jon Hamm, Ali Larter, and Demi Moore, Thornton is the focus, as the rough-and-tumble crisis manager making sure the black gold gets pumped and delivered—wrestling land and mineral rights from border cartels, handling pump-jack explosions, and negotiating with any number of oil-rich businessmen who want more than their share, all against a backdrop of dusty, sweaty West Texas. “He knows he’s not an actual cowboy, but he is a Texan,” says Thornton, quipping about his character’s limited range of outfits: white pearl-snap shirts, cowboy hats, and jeans. “I am gonna see if I can wear tighter pants next year,” he says. “My pants are so loose I look like a hip-hop guy.” (He does not.)
Landman is built around Thornton, and it will or won’t succeed based on how addictive it is to watch him work the oil patch. “I could tell how much he cared about getting it right and portraying the [character] accurately,” Wallace says. “He really shows all his colors in this,” says Larter, who plays Thornton’s ex-wife, Angela. “He has incredibly rigorous physical scenes and then emotionally raw scenes with me.” On the porch in Tomball, Thornton gets a call from Larter just to say hi; they’re all looking forward to getting back to filming together in Fort Worth and Weatherford for the already-confirmed season two.
Between now and then, the Boxmasters have more shows to play in support of Love & Hate in Desperate Places, their seventeenth album, which was released in August. Onstage, Thornton wails through retro rock-and-roll tunes such as “I Must’ve Been High” and “Jayne Mansfield’s Car.” He strategically waits until the last three songs to goad audience members into getting on their feet—a moment many use to take nonconsensual selfies with the star.
“It’s my job to connect with the audience and bring them along with us,” he says before the show, perhaps referring to his acting career as well as his musical one. (Thornton refers to himself as a musician who’s done a few movies—a humblebrag if there ever was one.) “You have to make them know that you’re not some star, you’re just a guy trying to entertain them.”
In today’s literal and figurative climates, though, he does worry that a segment of Landman’s potential audience will be turned off by a series about the dirty business of fossil fuels. “Don’t let the subject matter be your reason for . . . whatever your judgment is on it,” he says, seemingly talking not to the journalist sitting next to him but to an imaginary Tesla-driving Emmy voter. “Taylor’s not a guy who wants to ruin the atmosphere. He’s just a guy who’s trying to tell the truth about how this really works.” Physically he’s here in Texas, but mentally he’s in Hollywood, speaking to one more person who doesn’t understand what it means to live outside L.A.
Sitting in the more authentic of his two adopted home states, Thornton takes a swig and a drag. Will he grab another Bud Light? He responds like he was born and raised right here in Tomball: “Yes, ma’am.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “He’s Not From Texas, but Don’t Tell Hollywood.” Subscribe today.
Image credits: Billy Bob/Landman: Emerson Miller/Paramount+; Oil rig: Karina Eremina/Getty
