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Some actors are very much ‘of a time’, totally synonymous with a certain era in which they had most of their hits, and that’s definitely something that can be applied to Billy Bob Thornton.
And it’s not an insult in any way, because in a ten year span between the mid-1990s and 2000s, he broke into the mainstream film industry by force of sheer talent, not just as an actor but as a screenwriter and director too, dominating the Academy Awards and racking up superb films long before he became a paparazzi darling with Angelina Jolie on his arm, the pair of them rocking vials of each other’s blood.
At the start of the ‘90s, Thornton had teamed up with fellow up-and-comer Bill Paxton to make a noir thriller called One False Move, a film that he had written himself that told the story of three criminals who commit six murders over the course of one evening in order to get their hands on as much money and cocaine as possible.
Made on a low budget and distributed by a record label, it nevertheless attracted rave reviews from critics and won several industry awards. Thornton, for one, was very proud of it, later telling the LA Times: “This is a movie that I co-wrote and starred in. I was very proud of it. It was one of those movies that was made for $2million, and we did it on the fly, and the director was called a genius, and it was the critics’ darling.”
But what came next left him with a bad taste and a mistrust of Hollywood. The actor was still struggling for work and had no money, but his movie had attracted attention. Rather than promoting the original, however, his agent informed him that a mainstream studio wanted to go in a different direction.
Thornton recalled hearing, “’They’ve said they’re going to remake One False Move with stars and on about a $50million budget’. And they thought I was going to be happy! I told them I would be insulted”.
Citing the chemistry on show between him and Paxton as the main reason behind the film’s success, Thornton was not willing to allow household names to try to recreate it on a bigger budget. One False Move was never remade, and he put a series of movies in motion that would mark him out as one of the most important players in Hollywood.
He wrote, directed and starred in the 1996 drama Sling Blade about a man with psychiatric problems who befriends a young boy and his mother, which saw him Oscar-nominated for ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Screenplay’, which he won. Two years later, in 1998, he was nominated again, this time for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for the brilliant thriller A Simple Plan, and he had his biggest commercial hit to date alongside Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in the disaster blockbuster Armageddon.
Recently, Thornton has had something of a late career high point with the Taylor Sheridan-created Landman, the TV series about Texas oil rigs in which he stars as the lead character alongside Demi Moore. It follows his Golden Globe win back in 2015 for his work on the TV adaptation of the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
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