Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Wed 16 September 2026 18:45, UK
Since he’s never been a franchise guy, Billy Bob Thornton has had to look to the small screen for a role that he can play for as long as he can, and he’s doing alright on that front, to be honest.
It was never a stretch for him to play a hard-drinking, abrasive, and foul-mouthed character called Billy, but that’s why he was so tailor-made for Goliath, which lasted for four seasons and won him a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Television Series Drama’.
These days, he can be found leading Taylor Sheridan’s Landman, and, again, it’s not a stretch for the Academy Award-winning screenwriter to inhabit a part that was written with him in mind, with Thornton nabbing another Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Tommy Norris.
On the big screen, though, Bad Santa‘s Willie Soke is the only role he’s played more than once, and after the sequel failed to live up to the expectations raised by the 13-year wait, tanking at the box office, being panned by critics, and generally being a pale imitation of its beloved predecessor, it was all a bit pointless.
It took him decades to convince himself that television was an avenue worth exploring, and you can count the number of big-budget blockbusters he’s made on one hand, so it seems highly unlikely that the actor and musician will ever find a character outside of the gogglebox that he could hypothetically play forever.
Not everyone gets to be Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, with the Aussie having spent 26 years and counting as the comic book favourite, but when asked to name the favourite role of his career, Thornton nonetheless admitted that the production was nowhere near long enough for his liking.
“Jacob in A Simple Plan,” he answered. “I loved playing that character. Poor old Jacob. Every now and again, you play a character that you don’t want to stop. When it was over, I wished instead of three months, it would have gone on a lot longer.” Unfortunately, it didn’t, and in a borderline crime against cinema, hardly anyone bothered to watch the movie, either.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Sam Raimi’s 1998 crime thriller failed to recoup its budget, but it’s one of the most severely underrated and criminally overlooked genre flicks of the decade, with Thornton and Bill Paxton’s siblings stumbling upon a crashed plane, a dead pilot, and a shitload of money they decide to keep for themselves.
Needless to say, things don’t go the way the Mitchell brothers expected them to, and while it wasn’t the kind of film that was designed with sequels in mind, those three months on set were so joyous that Thornton would have given anything to keep the party going for as long as he could.
