{"id":297748,"date":"2025-11-20T19:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/297748\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T19:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:58:07","slug":"billy-bob-thornton-on-his-hollywood-marriage-and-acid-dropping-heyday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/297748\/","title":{"rendered":"Billy Bob Thornton on His Hollywood Marriage and Acid-Dropping Heyday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tActor and musician Billy Bob Thornton<\/a> sat for an intimate and revealing interview with rock legend Ann Wilson<\/a> on her new podcast, After Dinner Thinks, where their wide-ranging conversation dipped into his Hollywood life with ex-wife Angelina Jolie, his OCD, dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder, and included a reminisce from both musicians on past use of hallucinogens, with the Heart singer sharing a story about seeing Rosemary\u2019s Baby on a date while on acid.<\/p>\n

\n\tThornton\u2019s candid chat with Wilson is being released as the second season of his Taylor Sheridan-produced series, Landman<\/a>, <\/a>has begun streaming on Paramount+. The interview with Thornton in Nashville marks the ninth episode of Wilson\u2019s podcast, which features rock performances from the vocalist who has fronted Heart since the 1970s, including a rollicking cover of the 1963 Lesley Gore staple, \u201cYou Don\u2019t Own Me.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tIn the loose and intimate conversation, the two big-name celebrities are strikingly candid and the famously relaxed Thornton, who shot to fame in the early 1990s as an unlikely leading man in his Oscar-winning Sling Blade, discussed his rejection of the Hollywood lifestyle as his industry stock rose amid his May-December courtship and marriage to mega-hot star Jolie. The two were married for three years and split in 2003; Thornton has been married to his sixth wife, Connie Angland, since 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe live out between L.A. and Santa Barbara \u2014 there are recording studios there and my family lives there and that\u2019s pretty much where I stay. You don\u2019t see me in People magazine, on the star tracks, red carpet stuff, I just don\u2019t deal with it,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cPeople say, \u2018How do you describe your longevity? How does that happen?\u2019 I said, \u2018Well, I never really joined. That\u2019s basically it. I just never was much part of it when Angelina and I were married. She and I both were in the public eye all the time, but mostly I don\u2019t go to the parties. I don\u2019t hang out with all the agents and executives and stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn segments of the interview provided to The Hollywood Reporter in advance of the episode\u2019s debut online Nov. 20, Thornton and Wilson discuss the ups and downs of being professional musicians and the vulnerability that\u2019s necessary in stage performances. At 70 and 75 years old, respectively, Thornton and Wilson also talk about the awkwardness of discussing the legends of their heyday with young people who have no idea who country music mainstay Bill Anderson or guitar legend Steven Lee Cropper are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThornton may be best known for his film career, which garnered him an Oscar for his Sling Blade screenplay and two acting nominations, but in tandem, he\u2019s had a career in rock music. Over the past several decades, he has released four solo albums and 19 records with his band, The Boxmasters. Formed in California in the mid-1990s, the band consists of Thornton on vocals and Grammy Award-winning recording engineer J.D. Andrew.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOver the past 30 years, as his music career teetered in and out of activity, Thornton carved out a unique Hollywood persona that has led to multiple collaborations with the Coen Brothers (Intolerable Cruelty, The Man Who Wasn\u2019t There), an unlikely holiday staple (Bad Santa) and the opportunity to direct several films, including All the Pretty Horses and Jayne Mansfield\u2019s Car. Thornton has previously discussed his Hollywood career as \u201can accident\u201d and, while speaking on Wilson\u2019s podcast, delves into the perceived obstacles that he sees as his strengths throughout his varied career in show business.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI had to learn a lot of dialogue very quickly\u2026. I\u2019m as dumb as a bag of hair, but thank God I got a memory \u2014 that\u2019s about all I\u2019ve got,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI have severe obsessive compulsive disorder; I have an anxiety disorder. I grew up dyslexic. All these things, but I think because of those things, I am able to read in chunks. I don\u2019t read left or right slowly, like most people do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThornton went on to discuss how his daughter \u2014 one of four children he has fathered \u2014 is also on the autism spectrum, like him. This can impact, in various ways and levels of severity, how someone communicates, socializes and interacts with the world.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy daughter is going to Cal Poly right now. She\u2019s just turned 21, and she inherited some of my things\u00a0 and I\u2019m actually on the spectrum, I stutter, all these different things. So my daughter has all that, anxiety and OCD. She\u2019s not dyslexic \u2014 that\u2019s the only one she didn\u2019t get.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThornton tells Wilson that he and his daughter discuss these disorders \u201call the time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[We talk] about how these things that are looked at by the public as detriments,\u201d he tells her. \u201cBut they\u2019re actually strengths, especially in the arts. Because if you check through history, you can\u2019t tell me that Van Gogh and those guys weren\u2019t on the spectrum. But I haven\u2019t cut off any body parts yet!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the conversation grows more personal and reminiscent, the two legends get into their history with drug use \u2014 in particular, using acid while they were younger. Thornton gets candid about his history with psychedelics and why he kept doing acid even though he hated it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI do believe it did unlock my mind to be a better artist,\u201d he said. \u201cI honestly believe that psychedelics helped me as a writer and as an artist in general. I\u2019m glad I quit when I did, because I was a skinny, little, long-haired hippie working as a roadie, and I looked in a mirror at an Airstream trailer one night. I was like, \u2018You\u2019re gonna die. You have to stop.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWilson, for her part as a rock legend, one-ups him on this front with a hallucinogen horror story about a date, a tab of acid and a drive-in screening of Roman Polanski\u2019s horror-thriller Rosemary\u2019s Baby.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEverything was wrong with the picture,\u201d Wilson recalls. \u201cAnd man, was that ever the worst trip I ever had. And I got home finally, to my parents\u2019 house, where I still lived, and just spent the rest of the night just tossing and turning, just being so freaked out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton sat for an intimate and revealing interview with rock legend Ann Wilson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[170496,64,63,66326,447,134,66324],"class_list":{"0":"post-297748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ann-wilson","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-billy-bob-thornton","12":"tag-celebrities","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-landman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}