Wishing a very happy birthday to the Landman himself, Billy Bob Thornton, whom I had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing last winter in Crockett, Texas — shortly before his Ritz Theatre concert with his band The Boxmasters.
“I can always tell the husbands who got dragged here by their wives,” Thornton told me with a mischievous grin. “They just sit there with their arms folded while their wives want to dance.”
He laughed out loud when I told him he had a small role in one of the very first movies I ever reviewed for Variety — Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. But he laughed even harder when I asked him about appearing opposite Sam Elliott, who plays his father in Landman — despite being only 11 years older than Thornton.
Elliott is “a friend and a mentor,” Thornton said. “But I have to say — sometimes we’ll be doing a scene where I don’t have much dialogue, and my attention drifts, and I’ll get obsessed with looking at Sam Elliott’s mustache or something. Like, I’ll just be staring and then all of a sudden they’ll say, ‘Your line. Your line.’ And I’m like, ‘Huh?’ And then I go, ‘Oh yeah, this is wonderful chicken-fried steak.’ Or whatever it is.”
You can read my Cowboys & Indians Magazine interview with Thornton here. And here is my favorite song by The Boxmasters — “She Looks Like Betty Page.”
