Although Billy Bob Thornton has served some memorable performances, he’s never quite embraced his villain era.
The Oscar winner recently explained why he turned down “the bad guy” roles in Spider-Man (2002) and Mission: Impossible III (2006), noting he likes to be “looser and less predictable” in his work.
“I don’t have much interest in those kinds of roles,” he said on the Bingeworthy podcast. “With the Green Goblin, I didn’t feel like getting up at 4am for five or six hours of makeup. And with Mission: Impossible III, I didn’t want to be the guy trying to kill Tom Cruise. If you’re the bad guy in a big movie like that, audiences remember it forever. I prefer to keep things looser and less predictable.”
Willem Dafoe ultimately played the Norman Osborn (aka the Green Goblin) in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, while Philip Seymour Hoffman ended up in the MI3 role of arms dealer Owen Davian.
Thornton later won a Golden Globe for his performance as villainous hitman Lorne Malvo in Season 1 of FX‘s Fargo.
Billy Bob Thornton in Landman
Paramount+
He most recently earned his seventh Golden Globe nomination for his role in Taylor Sheridan‘s Landman as the titular oil rig crisis executive.
“I think if you’re in that world, it’s a dangerous business. You understand the risk involved,” Thornton told Deadline of the role. “My character obviously came up doing more menial jobs in this. So he has been there. He knows how this works, and now suddenly he’s like the foreman between the guy that owns the oil company and the people who work in the oil fields. There’s not even much time to think in the job of being a landman. You’re on the move all the time. There’s always a problem to solve because he is a fixer really. You develop an obsession with being successful. I think he’s driven and doesn’t really think about that much, though I think he’s a bit fatalistic about it.”