(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 12 September 2025 17:45, UK
As anyone who has ever seen a great film, listened to a great album, or read a great novel knows, sometimes beautiful things can emerge from struggle, and Billy Bob Thornton knows this more than most.
Before finally making it big in Hollywood in the late 1990s, Thornton spent more than a decade struggling to express himself as a musician and actor. After growing up in rural Arkansas, he spent much of the ‘70s playing drums in a southern rock band known as Tres Hombres. They released their sole studio album in ‘83, but it didn’t set the world on fire, and by the mid-’80s, Thornton had switched his focus to acting.
Before he bit the bullet and decided to move to Los Angeles to give himself the best chance of success, though, Thornton did some minor roles in the South. It was while playing one of these parts – a role he’d begged and pleaded to land – that he had an existential crisis about what he truly wanted to get out of acting. After all, he’d immediately sold out his creative aspirations to write and star in meaningful projects just because he was desperate to get any role that would pay. Then, to his horror, this one turned out to be so minor and in such a forgettable project that it’s not even listed on his IMDB page.
“I was acting in a made-for-cable movie, where I had a total of four lines,” Thornton told Roger Ebert in 2012, hilariously refusing to even dignify the film by uttering its name. “I was real mad at myself. I hated the movie, I hated the role.” On top of that, the people behind the film were, to put it mildly, assholes, and Thornton was furious with himself for grovelling to them “to get such a useless part.”
Fascinatingly, though, as is often the case, out of this anger, resentment, and self-loathing came the key to launching Thornton’s entire career as one of Hollywood’s most unique leading men. One day, while shooting the movie that shall not be named, Thornton was staring in the mirror, trying to psyche himself up for another soul-crushing day on-set. Absent-mindedly, he began “making faces in the mirror”, and before he knew it, he realised he was forming a character in real time.
“I kind of dropped my jaw and said, ‘Why are you here?,’” Thornton revealed. Amazingly, this new persona that he was developing at the moment answered him. “It came out in Karl’s voice,” he claimed, referring to Karl Childers, the mentally challenged matricidal killer he played in 1996’s Sling Blade. “And then I just kept on talking, and that entire opening monologue in the movie – Karl’s whole life story – just came out of myself. Where it came from, I don’t know.”
The way Thornton tells it, it was almost like he was possessed by the spirit of Childers, a character who simply needed a conduit into this world. Whether or not you believe in that kind of thing is neither here nor there, though. Instead, what is important is that the angst Thornton was feeling about his early career not being as fulfilling as he’d imagined eventually led (more than a decade later) to his breakthrough.
Sure, he had to perform as Childers in a one-man show and then a short film before he was finally allowed to write, direct, and star in Sling Blade, but the journey started the fateful day he met that disillusioned man in the mirror.
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