‘Landman’ Star Billy Bob Thornton Is in it for the Long Haul: ‘Taylor Has a Vision’

In 2021, Billy Bob Thornton had a brief cameo in an episode of “1883,” the hugely popular “Yellowstone” spinoff. That’s where he met Taylor Sheridan, whose vast television empire includes most of the shows people subscribe to Paramount+ for (including “Lioness,” “Mayor of Kingstown” and “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”). “He said, ‘I wrote this cameo and when I looked at it, I realized I can’t just cast a local. I need somebody who’s done this before in a bigger way,’” Thornton said. At the “1883” premiere in Las Vegas, Thornton and Sheridan sat together at the afterparty and Sheridan told him, “I’m writing this thing called ‘Landman’ for you and you’re going to love it.”

“I’m not the type who takes stuff that I’m not right for because I want to present myself in the best possible way,” Thornton said. “I always tell people, if you’re going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle, get a Frenchman.” He said that while he gets praised for playing “all these different kinds of characters, it’s all in a certain wheelhouse.” Still, when Thornton read the ‘Landman’ scripts, he thought, OK, I’m the best guy for the part. He told Sheridan he was in. “But then the writers strike happened and he had to lay off for a while.”

Now, finally, “Landman” is here. And instead of essaying a brief role in a Sheridan vehicle, Thornton has got the whole thing to himself.

He plays Tommy Norris, a crisis executive at a powerful oil company. He’s got a pepper of an ex-wife (played by Ali Larter) and an equally feisty daughter (Michelle Randolph from another Sheridan series, “1923”). His son (Jacob Lofland) has also just started working the oil field as a roughneck. In the first episode, Norris is dealing with a situation involving a cartel plane that has collided with one of the oil company’s trucks.

One of the joys of the show is the way that Thornton easily spouts oil industry jargon. He said he was aided tremendously by Christian Wallace, whose Texas Monthly-produced podcast “Boomtown”served as the inspiration for “Landman.” “Christian was on the set all the time,” he said. “If there was a real technical oil question and Christian was there, you could just ask him because when you are spouting off technical stuff or the lingo of a business, then you need to know what you’re saying. You need to know what it means. Audiences aren’t stupid. They’ll pick up on it if you’re just reciting lines. I would just ask him, ‘What exactly does this mean?’ And then once you understand it, then you can say it with more conviction.” Thornton has had to do this type of thing before–with the NASA stuff in “Armageddon” and the air traffic control-speak in “Pushing Tin.”

Verisimilitude was all part of Sheridan’s plan for “Landman.” “Taylor has a vision,” Thornton said. “He has a great vision. We trusted him all the way through that this was going to be exactly what he said it was going to be. And he was right.”

Landman
Paramount

Actors on some of Sheridan’s other shows talk about how hands-off he can be. He trusts you to bring a character to life and leaves you to it, as Thornton discovered on Landman. “If you can’t read the script and know who the character is, then you’re already behind the eight ball,” he said. “But also, Taylor said the great thing about (us) getting to hang out before he wrote this is he had my voice. I was around Taylor a lot and some of it’s his voice. I know my voice, I know his voice. I think you’ll see the character’s development and you do get his backstory and you do know who he is.”

Wherever “Landman” goes after Season 1, Thornton is going with it. “I’m signed up for it,” the actor said. “Ten years ago, it wouldn’t have been fun for me. But there’s a different perception now. All the actors want to be in streaming now. That’s where you get to develop a character. What director or writer or actor doesn’t want to be able to do a movie that they don’t cut to an hour and a half? It’s a director’s dream to do 10 hours of movie. An episode can be 48 minutes long or it can be an hour and two minutes long. Unless you’re doing Marvel movies and stuff like that, the movie business is not really the place anymore.”

This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

Visionaries / Race Begins Colman Domingo and Greg Kwedar
Photo by Joe Pugliese for TheWrap

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