Billy Bob Thornton has had some memorable performances, but he’s never fully embraced his villainous days.
The Oscar winner recently explained why he turned down “villain” roles in Spider-Man (2002) and Mission: Impossible III (2006), saying that his films are “loose and predictable.” He said he prefers things that are “hard to do.”
“I’m not really interested in roles like that,” he said on the Bingeworthy podcast. “For Green Goblin, I didn’t want to get up at 4 a.m. and put on makeup for five or six hours. And for Mission: Impossible III, I didn’t want to be the guy who tried to kill Tom Cruise. If you’re the bad guy in a big movie like this, the audience will remember it forever. I like to keep things looser and less predictable.
Willem Dafoe will eventually play Norman Osborn (aka the Green Goblin) in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and Philip Seymour Hoffman will eventually play the role of MI3 arms dealer Owen Davian. It became.
Thornton later won a Golden Globe Award for playing the villainous hitman Lorne Malvo in Season 1 of FX’s Fargo.
Billy Bob Thornton in “The Landman”
paramount+
He most recently earned his seventh Golden Globe nomination for his role as an oil rig crisis management executive in Taylor Sheridan’s The Landman.
“If you’re in that world, I think it’s a risky business. I understand there are risks involved,” Thornton told Deadline about the role. “My character obviously got to do a much simpler job in this one, so he was there. He knew how this worked, and now all of a sudden, In my job, I became a kind of foreman between the oil company owner and the people working in the oil fields. You don’t have much time. You’re always on the move. He’s really a fixer, so there’s always a problem to solve. He’s driven, he’s real. I don’t think I think about it that much, but I think I’m a bit fatalistic about it.”
