Once upon a time there were cowboys, at least in the movies, and they stared at a range untrammeled by barbed wire and Chipotles and Walmarts. Cowboys set the mold for how the world saw America — rugged, risk-taking, deeply individual — and you could argue they’re America’s first celebrities, the country telling a mythology about itself.
Landman, the show created by Fort Worth-raised Taylor Sheridan and returning for a second season on Paramount+ this Sunday, is not about cowboys, unlike Sheridan’s breakout success, Yellowstone, which brought Stetsons into Brooklyn dive bars. It’s about oil, a 20th-century gold rush that became a 21st-century cautionary tale. The show examines the American dream at a time when that idea has become suspect. The Westerns told us there were good guys (us) and bad guys (them); the modern world knows we are all complicit.
As the landman of the title, Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris is fighting a losing battle with modernity: the rusty oil rigs, the family he no longer understands, the “no smoking” sign on the corner where he badly needs a smoke. Temperamentally, he is more cowboy than any hero in the Sheridan canon — Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King, Jeremy Renner in Mayor of Kingstown — operating as a lone wolf in a landscape that refuses to be tamed. He barrels along the dusty roads of Odessa in his gas-guzzling Ford, staring at a world disappearing before his eyes.
Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, pictured here in the second season of “Landman,” is a man fighting a losing battle with the modern world.
Emerson Miller / Emerson Miller/Paramount+
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“I grew up around a lot of Tommy Norrises,” Thornton said in his Arkansas drawl during a Q&A last week at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. “Taylor [Sheridan] writes such great stuff that you just have to go out there and be yourself in the part.”
So he was raised by Tommy Norrises, but he also became one.
The boom years
Billy Bob Thornton grew up near Hot Springs, Ark., a skinny kid with long hair who loved muscle cars and keggers and Johnny Cash. He weighed all of 136 pounds, so football wasn’t in the cards, but his baseball swing was sweet enough for him to try out for the Kansas City Royals. Music, Mustangs, booze, sports — an old-fashioned American boyhood.
He left college to pursue music in Los Angeles. In 1983, his band Tres Hombres put out the album Gunslinger. Never heard of it? Well, maybe that’s why he leaned into acting, mostly small parts on TV. His shifty eyes and weaselly good looks were enough to get him cast in Tombstone, where he played a cheating card dealer kicked out of an Old West saloon by Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp. This was 1993, the reign of Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks, and Thornton was never gonna get a leading role unless he wrote it. So he did.
Billy Bob Thornton’s 1996 film “Sling Blade.”
File photo
Sling Blade was Thornton’s Spindletop, the life-changing discovery of one man’s vast resources. He could write, direct and act. He was already in his 40s when that Southern Gothic, about a gentle oddball accused of murder, hit theaters in 1996. The movie became such a sensation it elbowed past prestige pics like The English Patient and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet to win the Oscar for best adapted screenplay (it was based on Thornton’s one-man show).
On awards night, Thornton wore a weird neck ribbon, a three-piece suit and a ZZ Top hat, possibly a clue that Hollywood had a handful with this one. But the audience gave him a standing ovation. They were so excited to witness this nobody from Arkansas — with his country accent and thinning hair — make his way among the golden gods of Southern California. By the time Thornton reached the podium, he was overcome. “Lord, have mercy,” he said.
Hollywood turned out to be a weird place, and Billy Bob Thornton didn’t really fit in. He had successes (another Oscar nod for his role in A Simple Plan), but the more compelling drama became his personal one. He ditched the wife he brought to the 1997 Oscars, who was his fourth, and got engaged to the actress Laura Dern only to crash-land into a surprise marriage with a young Angelina Jolie. If you aren’t old enough to remember the Jolie-Thornton tabloid fireball of 2000 — the vials of each other’s blood they were rumored to wear around their necks, the horny pawing on the red carpet — then, my condolences.
Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie in 2001.
File photo
Dating the hottest woman on the planet scrambled the whole “underdog makes good” storyline. We’d mistaken Thornton for an everyman, but he was more like a visitor from planet WTF, as profile after profile made clear. His mother was a psychic. He had a fear of antique furniture.
Nobody knew where to put this cat. He knocked around action movies (Armageddon) and indie darlings (Monster’s Ball) and arthouse quirks (The Man Who Wasn’t There), but the promise that launched his career grew wobbly. When he directed a screen version of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Harvey Weinstein took a hatchet to his final cut.
By the time he staggered on-screen as the anti-hero of Bad Santa, the 2003 black comedy, he was “going through kind of a lost weekend,” he said once. The mall Santa he played was a drunken lout, but audiences loved this raunchy off-sides version of Billy Bob Thornton, and that’s where he stayed for a long time.
Billy Bob Thornton in the 2003 black comedy “Black Santa,” a drunken anti-hero role he played so well he almost didn’t get out of it.
Columbia TriStar, File
The bust years
I couldn’t be the only one who lost interest in Billy Bob Thornton over the following decade. A Bad News Bears remake, the Todd Phillips flop School for Scoundrels, something called Mr. Woodcock. He played the football coach in the film version of Friday Night Lights, but I don’t even remember him, that’s how much the part didn’t stick, while Kyle Chandler played that role in the TV show and steered it into the stars.
His Spindletop had run dry. He turned to music again, starting a band called the Boxmasters in 2007. He made a film in 2012 called Jayne Mansfield’s Car; nobody saw it. His career was enough in the weeds that in 2014, when accolades came in for his performance as a dapper sociopath in the television version of Fargo, you could almost call it a comeback.
Billy Bob Thornton as a football coach in that other version of “Friday Night Lights.”
Universal Studios, File
He was in his 60s when he got a call from Taylor Sheridan, another college dropout from the South who became Hollywood’s “man of the moment” in his 40s. Sheridan tapped him for a cameo in 1883, a pistol-slinging marshal in the Old West, and took him to dinner.
As Thornton tells it, Sheridan mentioned he was building a show around him, based on a podcast called Boomtown. It was not the most obvious star vehicle for Thornton. Hitting in 2019 from Texas Monthly and hosted by Christian Wallace, a writer who grew up in the Permian Basin, Boomtown was less a narrative and more like a series of character studies about the wildcatters and wheeler-dealers and roughnecks and strippers lured to the strange no-man’s-land of Odessa-Midland. There was no character named Tommy Norris, but if you swirled a lot of the elements together — the risk-taking yeehaw and the outlaw spirit and the bitter dust of boom and bust — you might get someone like Billy Bob.
Landman is not the best Taylor Sheridan show (1883) or the most influential (Yellowstone), but it might be the most popular, one of the top shows of 2024, a rarity for Paramount+, not a staple streamer in most households. The second season, expanding the roles of Demi Moore and Andy Garcia and bringing Sam Elliott into the fold as Norris’ estranged father, is poised to continue the streak.
Billy Bob Thornton, right, as Tommy in the second season of “Landman,” which greatly expands the role of Cami Miller, played by Demi Moore, second from right.
Emerson Miller / Emerson Miller/Paramount+
I could offer a few reasons why the show broke big. Oil and gas is a ginormous industry, and the legions of ordinary folks who work in it might be tired of seeing themselves portrayed as heartless villains. Texas is an idea that resonates overseas, because the rest of the world got hooked on the cowboy mythology, too.
But if I had to give one reason, it would be Billy Bob Thornton. With his cig dangling from his lips, his boots covered in caliche dust and a one-liner at the quick, he looks like masculine heroes did for much of the 20th century. Strong and clever, tough but tender-hearted, sun-chapped and road-weary, the last of the red-hot smokers.
‘What’s up, honey?’
I met Billy Bob Thornton on the red carpet outside the recent Landman screening at the Modern Art Museum, though “met” is a generous word for sticking a tiny microphone in someone’s face. It’s hard to cover a red carpet without contemplating how awful it would be to walk one — the same questions over and over — but Billy Bob seemed to be having fun, in a baseball cap and pointy snake-embroidered cowboy boots.
“What’s up, honey?” he asked the young and slightly nervous interviewer beside me, placing a hand on her shoulder with paternal warmth. It was an unusual thing to do on the red carpet, as though he were grounding her, shifting her energy from high-wire celebrity interaction to just-friends.
Sam Elliott, left, and Billy Bob Thornton chat during a red carpet event for the season 2 premiere of “Landman” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Fort Worth, Texas, on Nov. 6, 2025.
Jason Janik / Special Contributor
After all those years of raising hell, Thornton had settled down. He and his wife, Connie Angland, have been together for over 20 years. They have a daughter named Bella. In the crumbling landscape of Hollywood, where it’s hard to tell Chris Pine from Chris Evans or Chris Pratt, Thornton has become an elder statesman who held on to his drawl and his soft skinny body, never getting ripped to play a superhero for one of those blockbusters that still pretends good guys and bad guys are easy to tell apart. He is one of the last leading men known by first name alone.
“Billy Bob Thornton,” I said as he approached, placing out his hands so I could take them. I curtseyed, something I hadn’t planned to do, but I was so struck by his gallantry that I felt the need to return volley.
“Oh stop that,” he said, in a playful way. “I’m just a guy.” His eyes sparkled when he smiled.
I asked him about Fort Worth, a place he loves. “My relatives were all either in Arkansas or Texas, so I grew up down here,” he said, his hands shoved in his pockets. “There’s something about Fort Worth that’s so real it just makes you feel like you’re home.”
On screen he looked grizzled, beat up by Father Time, but in person he seemed ageless. His skin was so luminous I could not believe he was 70.
“If I could shoot everything I do in Fort Worth, I would,” he said.
The author interviews Billy Bob Thornton on the red carpet at an event for the second season of “Landman” on Nov. 6, 2025, in Fort Worth.
Rick Kern / Getty Images for Fort Worth Film
The guy running the red carpet had limited us to two questions. Since I’d heard Billy Bob answer a common one, about his favorite place to eat (a spot in Weatherford he didn’t name), I asked his favorite Thanksgiving dish.
“The rest of the country calls it stuffing, but we call it dressing,” he said. “Dressing and gravy.” He chuckled, and I was struck by the deep grooves of his dimples. Cuter in person, for sure.
He turned to go — I’d burned through my two questions — when I said, “Thank you for being one of the last smokers on television.” I pointed in my mouth to reveal nicotine gum.
“Oh right,” he said, leaning in again, as though I’d reminded him of something he forgot. He spoke in a softer voice, no longer the performed talking points of an actor but chitchat between two people who shared a questionable habit. “They’ve vilified smokers.” His voice sounded concerned, like this had just happened, but it still surprised me how a legal and once common indulgence marked a person as a pariah. Among the warning labels slapped on the opening of Landman — violence, language — was that verboten word: smoking.
“So you can kill 50,000 people with a machine gun, but if you’re smoking, all of a sudden, you corrupted America,” Thornton said, poking at the hypocrisy of a culture where a random internet scroll connects you to footage of a real-life murder but if you accidentally blow smoke in a stranger’s face, they shoot you the death stare.
It was a rant that could have come from the mouth of Tommy Norris. In the show’s pilot episode, Norris dresses down a guy who reminds him that smoking kills. “You ever been to Japan?” Norris snaps back. “The whole country smokes. 90-year-old men sucking on filterless Pall Malls then doing an hour of tai chi in the park. … Lung cancer ain’t even in the top 10 leading causes of death.”
The point of that rant was that sugar and processed American foods are killing us, too, so what if we all get to pick our poison? Like a lot of Landman riffs — throwing shade at wind turbines’ clean energy, for instance — it comes too quickly to fact check, and is less accurate in specifics (lung cancer actually is a leading cause of death in Japan) than mischievous in its desire to knock anyone foolish enough to ride in on a high horse.
Media coverage has long obsessed over whether Sheridan shows are blue-state or red-state, but their popularity comes from capturing a landscape where such designations are silly, because we all live together. Everyone can be an idiot, and anyone can win the day. “The right side of history” is land nobody gets to claim.
The cast of “Landman” pose for photos during a red carpet event for the season 2 premiere of the show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on Nov. 6, 2025.
Jason Janik / Special Contributor
Back on the red carpet, Thornton was still going. He plucked a yellow pack of American Spirits from his pocket, assured me he smoked natural tobacco and got two physicals a year; his lungs were fine. “In the meantime, there’s a liquor store on every corner,” he said. “The most domestic violence in America is associated with alcohol.”
“Preach,” I said, as the guy running the red carpet tapped on my shoulder, indicating time’s up, but good luck getting me to stop Billy Bob Thornton on a roll. His monologue was winding down, though.
“Just don’t smoke chemicals,” he said, like a father telling me to be home in time for supper, and then he flashed that warm smile.
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