The Oscar-winning film that banned Billy Bob Thornton from the screen: “It’s not going to be in the movie”

Posted On December 30, 2025December 30, 2025

Billy Bob Thornton has been around a long, long while now, but not long enough that he’s too far gone to be able to do things like full-frontal scenes in his modern western drama series Landman, for which he should either be applauded or told to put it away, tough to work out which really. 

One of those many Taylor Sheridan-created shows that seem to pop up on an almost monthly basis since he first made Yellowstone back in 2017, Landman has been another hit for Sheridan over its two seasons so far and has given Thornton another lease of life after a fairly quiet few years aside from the occasional cameo. 

It’s a shame really that Thornton’s hangover from being seen as a Hollywood “badboy” in the late 1990s and early 2000s overshone his considerable talent to some degree, because he is not just a fantastic actor but also a superb writer and director too, responsible for the brilliant 1996 drama Sling Blade for which he picked up an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’ and a nomination for ‘Best Actor’ too. 

That led to what is most commonly thought of as his golden period, during which he picked up another Academy Award nomination for the fantastic thriller A Simple Plan, landed major roles in blockbusters like Bruce Willis’ Armageddon and then went opposite Halle Berry for the hugely acclaimed Monster’s Ball in 2001, with Berry winning a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar. 

But had things gone differently a decade earlier, Thornton might have already been on the path to success as he should have lined up alongside Kathy Bates and James Caan in the 1990 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Misery.

Directed by Rob Reiner, who tragically died this year, Misery was one of the biggest hits of the year when it was released, making a star of Bates, who would go on to win the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for her performance as the deranged stalker Annie Wilkes and bringing in four times its budget at the box office. 

And Thornton had been personally selected by Reiner to play a sheriff’s deputy in the film, after acing an audition, after which the director told him they could send everybody else home. But sadly for the young actor, things didn’t pan out as he hoped. 

He recently told Variety about the experience, saying: “I was very excited. And I got a call from Rob Reiner – not many directors would do this – he called me and he said, ‘Listen, I’ve been looking at the script and been planning out what I’m going to do with this movie.’ He said, ‘You can come up here and shoot this for the money or the insurance or whatever you need, but I’m just telling you, it’s not going to be in the movie.”

The disappointment wasn’t one that Thornton took personally, however, and it sparked fierce creativity in him over the next few years as he wrote screenplays and took small parts in films like Indecent Proposal and Kurt Russell’s Tombstone before he was able to write and direct Sling Blade. 

Things eventually came full circle for Thornton as he played a Sheriff in one of Sheridan’s earlier shows, the Yellowstone spin-off 1883. It was after his performance in that show that Sherdian created Landman for him.

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