Billy Bob Thornton has a child’s heart, a truck-driver’s mouth and a William Faulkner brain. His pal Robert Duval has dubbed him the hillbilly Orson Wells, but he could have just as easily called him the Socrates of the South. He is far more philosophical and complex than he lets on. That famous, which smile burns about as hot and long as a flashcube, does not appear to come from happiness. Still, it seems authentic enough—maybe something he learned as a kid to get out of washing the dishes. I don’t think that it’s a shield used to deflect people looking too closely—he doesn’t seem to be hiding anything behind those teeth—he lays his pain right there in the spotlight, next to his celebrity. At first glance he’s a charming open book of a quirky chain smoker, equal parts cool, smart and strange. It would be easy to underestimate him, lean lazily on the good ole’ boy tag, and recycle variations of the headline he detests: Beverly Hills-Billy.
    Like many of you, I am acquainted with the essential Billy Bob video collection: The Man Who Wasn’t There, Monster’s Ball, Sling Blade, a Simple Plan, Pushing Tin, Bandits, Bad Santa. But are these merely lines that he reads or lives that he’s lived? The pain of Ed Crane, Jacob Mitchell, Russell Bell, Karl Childers, Hank Grotowski and even Bad Santa seem to have been born in Thornton’s big broken heart.
    These men wander onto the screen like a blind man tapping a cane on a freeway off ramp. Salvation rests on a razor’s edge as they feel their way out of pitch-blackness, not into perfect light, but a hazy dimly lit dusk where things are slightly better than okay. It’s as if Billy Bob can’t conceive of a heaven without something broken in it. The conclusion of Monster’s Ball finds him seated in a forgotten and flawed paradise, on a creaky wooden porch with a beautiful woman, saying, “We’re going to be all right.” In spite of long odds, he always has been.
    Billy Bob Thornton enters a suite at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. He is dressed all in black, and is no more pompous than you would expect his gardener to be, making eye contact with each of us, greeting us separately and sincerely. “I used to live here,” he says, smiling. He lights a smoke like a torch of liberty, a small victory against a world intent upon snuffing out our freedom to destroy ourselves.
    Every guy wants to hang with Billy Bob, to play cards, or pool, or three-flies up, knock back a few long necks with him and maybe discuss the finer points of Captain Beefheart, rock instrumental music or Tommy Boy. So, it is perhaps surprising that his biggest real-life fans are women, especially hurt women who want to pull him under the covers and make it all better. But there’s something else, many something elses. Here is Sling Blade’s Karl Childers, all hunkered down with misunderstood good intentions, a savant whiz kid who can “fix anything” except for the cursed side of the blessing that is his life, than conducting an interview. It’s like the loneliness in the best of country music, his peddle steel voice alternating between longing and hope. To say he is nice, or mean, foolish or wise is an insult to his complexity and to everyone with sensitive hearts and minds and souls who attempt to float above the garbage of earth.
    Billy Bob Thornton is a movie star and a Hollywood legend. But he had an opportunity offered to one in millions—to transcend even those lofty heights, to become James Dean pulled unscathed from the wreckage of Little Bastard, JD Salinger exiled to Margaritaville. I mean, what if he would have bailed after the release of Sling Blade? There would be an occasional sighting in Barbados or some distant place, playing dive bars for drinks and tips. But you can’t really blame him for doing the next best thing: Attracting fortune, fame and more than his share of gorgeous women. Happiness? Now that’s quite another story.

Risen Magazine: On a scale of one to 10, how neurotic are you?
BBT: [Laughter] I think that there are different degrees of insanity—there’s the artistic insanity, there’s the Republican insanity, [Laughter] I think that everybody’s born with something. But I’m not sure that 10’s enough; [Laughter] I think I go to 11.

RM: What events have shaped your life?
BBT: My father was a high school basketball coach. He wanted me to play sports, and I was the local high school baseball hero. That wasn’t really quite good enough for him because he wanted me to be a football player. I said, “Look, I’m gonna’ get killed out there, that isn’t what I do.” So I did that, and my mother encouraged me to play music. I had a band from the time I was a little kid, and that’s really what I thought I was gonna’ do. I didn’t have any success at it except for in the last few years.
    I had this drama teacher in high school. Her name was Mollie Treadway. I was, maybe, 20 and when she died I was a pallbearer at her funeral. She used to see me writing short stories in class and doing all sorts of creative things like that. She said, “We’re gonna’ let you run the class sometimes,” which she’d never done before. So, she let me run my own plays and direct them and cast the people from the class. That was my first directing experience, when I was a senior in high school. She was the only teacher that ever encouraged me, and I think that it’s because of her that I got into acting.

RM: I read somewhere that you’ve been called the hillbilly Orson Wells.
BBT: Oh, that was Robert Duvall; he loves saying that.

RM: Orson Wells went from Citizen Kane to performing parlor magic; do you get criticized for going from a masterwork like Sling Blade to Bad Santa?
BBT: No, because most people consider Bad Santa a masterwork.

RM: At what level?
BBT: Okay, this guy’s a lousy drunk who doesn’t even like the kid and he’s a thief and all these things. But in the end Bad Santa actually has a pretty decent message, which is that even losers at the bottom of it have a soul someplace. This guy meets this kid who reminds him of his own pathetic life, and he ends up having the spirit of Christmas anyway.

RM: Do people get your movies?
BBT: There are still a lot of people who come up to me saying, Hey man, I love that Sling Blade that was funnier than s—t. I say funny, what are you talking about? There are people that aren’t able to think beyond a certain level. They obviously didn’t understand what the movie was about, but there was something that appealed to them about it. I wish that they would like it for the reasons they were supposed to, I guess. But the movie said a lot of things—it addresses the fact that religion is not a bad thing at its core; it depends on whose hands it’s in. Probably half of America wouldn’t get that Sling Blade made a pro-gay statement. It’s like this—Do you want your child to be parented by a heterosexual who on the surface follows the rules of the Bible or something, but who is a horrible son-of-a-bitch ruining this kid’s life, or do you want the gay guy who loves the woman and the kid to be the influence?

RM: It seemed to have a pro-life statement too. When Karl goes to kill his father it’s because of an abortion; are you pro-life?
BBT: Uh, I’m pro-choice, simply because I believe in looking at the particular circumstances as opposed to saying here are the rules. I’m kind of pro-choice in everything. You gotta’ see what the circumstances are. Okay, a girl gets raped by some guy, and she has to have his baby? That doesn’t make any sense, does it? At the same time I don’t think that people should be getting abortions five times a week. Who would like that? I call myself a radical moderate. [Laughter] I don’t say that every conservative person is an as——e. I don’t say that ever liberal person’s an as——e, but I believe that every extreme right-wing person is and every bleeding-heart liberal is. They’re the same people. These are people who think their way’s the way and I don’t think there is a way. I’m sort of cotton to the old American Indian theories—I believe that life is a stream and there are rocks in it and we just kind of go around them and keep goin’.

RM: Did you go to church as a kid?
BBT: We were Methodists, semi-Catholics we were called. [Laughter] I was a kid and just sort of went in there and threw s—t at old ladies’ hats and things.

RM: Who do you think God is?
BBT: You, Frank Zappa, Benjamin Franklin, people like that.

RM: I’m in good company; who does God think you are?
BBT: Captain Beefheart’s illegitimate child. [Laughter]

RM: Even Tom Waits seems to have learned from Captain Beefheart.
BBT: I love Tom Waits; he’s amazing.

RM: Have you ever been baptized?
BBT: Yeah, I was eight years old. I was really happy because the Methodists sprinkle you as opposed to dunking you, because I have a water phobia. You see, I don’t believe in a God who would destroy people. I believe in God, but how’s that God? If God discriminates, He isn’t God, because He already said I don’t discriminate. We’re all God’s children, except you guys; it doesn’t make sense to me.

RM: Your mother, Virginia, is a psychic; did she ever predict anything that had to do with your future?
BBT: Oh yeah, all kind of things.

RM: Accurately?
BBT: Um hmm. Here’s the thing about psychics; some people say they’re psychics and some people really are. So you get the ones in the newspapers that say, Our next president will be a male, white and kinda tall, or something like that. The things my mother’s predicted about my career are more general. Yeah, she did predict that I was gonna’ get an Academy Award, actually more than one. I only got the one so far. Uh, Mom! [Laughter] She saw me around Burt Reynolds before I was even an actor. But it’s not that stuff that really gets to me; it’s the little obscure stuff that she says. I was 20, 21 and really broke when my mother had asked me; “Do you know someone named Slidell?” I said “No.” Then she asked, “Do you know a place called that?” I said, “No, I don’t.” She said someone named Slidell or a place named that is going to help you get some money. So this cousin calls and says, “Listen, I’ve got to haul a load of this stuff and I was wondering if you would help me out with the driving? I said, Yeah, sure, where you goin’? and he said Slidell, Louisiana, and he paid me 200 dollars. Stuff like that; it’s really obscure”.

RM: Proverbs says pride comes before a fall; have you ever been prideful?
BBT: I’ve had my moments, but I’m way too neurotic to be prideful. I’m like so Jewish and yet I’m not, you know what I mean? I have so much guilt in me, but I’ve had times when I thought everything was okay. I’ve quit thinking that; I don’t think everything’s great anymore.

RM: It reminds me of Robert Duval in Tender Mercies where he says, “I don’t trust happiness; I never have.”
BBT: That’s one of my favorite lines in any movie. It’s one of my favorite movies, that and a movie called Tomorrow, which most people have never seen. If you ever get a chance, get that movie. Duvall’s a master; he’s my hero.

RM: How long did you live exclusively on potatoes?
BBT: Just for a couple of weeks, until the bag ran out. I was broke, and I was too prideful [ironic chuckle] to tell anyone. When I was first out here, I was in this acting class with a guy that I could go to for free ‘cuz he liked me. I lived in this little hovel in Glendale, CA. I had friends who would have helped me out, but I was embarrassed about it; I mean already I’m a hillbilly to these people.

RM: Does the opposite apply, where you feel guilty about the money that you now have?
BBT: Oh yeah. When people ask me where I live, I’m so embarrassed. I live in Beverly Hills. My kids want me to get a trailer. [Laughter]

RM: Do you spend a lot of time with your kids?
BBT: Um hm.

RM: Do you do anything special in ways of parenting?
BBT: I let my kids know who dad is, you know. I mean, I play rock ‘n’ roll music, I’m in the movies, I ain’t perfect, but I love them very, very much.

RM: Do they lecture you?
BBT: My 10-year-old does, my nine-year-old’s like me; he doesn’t care. He’s like, Whatever you want to do