That’s a great piece on this whole fear of aging thing. That movie is wild.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh yeah.
JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy. But how many women would agree to that deal if it was real? Realistic enough where you’re watching. I know a lot of ladies who would agree to that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right, right.
JOE ROGAN: I know a lot of ladies.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Have you seen that South Park episode where they, it was about that type of thing, but it was about how they have all these apps that you can make yourself look better in. I mean, it’s like filters that make you look younger and all this kind of stuff.
And they have this episode about that where all these girls who aren’t the hot girls, but their Instagram stuff, they are. And they actually start to think. And so all the guys start going for these girls, even though when they’re in front of them, they’re not like that, but that’s what they look like on there. And yeah, it’s pretty crazy.
JOE ROGAN: It’s probably accurate too. As long as a couple people start doing it, a couple guys start going for those girls, then everybody else will as well.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Which is most of our world. Most of our world is some f*ing idiot decides bell bottoms look good. We’re all like, I got to get bell bottoms. I want to get laid. I want to be cool.
Fashion Disasters of the ’70s
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I had bell bottoms when I was playing in bands and stuff. So whatever was trendy, we wore that stuff. I can remember those bell bottoms that were so big you couldn’t see your shoes. It just looked like a pair of jeans walking down the street. It was so dumb looking.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a crazy thing that lasted for a little while. Like regular jeans, somebody invented that in the 1800s. And everybody’s like, yeah, you nailed it. And it’s like a Jeep. The Jeep still looks like a Jeep. They made a Jeep in the 1950s. Made a Jeep in 2026. You could see the difference.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a little bit more advanced, but that’s a Jeep. Jeans, they nailed it. Bell bottoms are like, what the f* were we doing?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right? Oh, I mean, I had shirts with bell sleeves with pictures of sailboats and stuff on it. It’s like, are you kidding me? I mean, lime green and orange and things like that.
JOE ROGAN: Remember the Elvis style collars?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, for… What happened? I know.
JOE ROGAN: I have a theory. Because all that stuff happened after they passed the Sweeping Psychedelic Schedule One act in 1970. And I think they cut everybody off from mushrooms and acid and anything that makes you think. And then they started giving them coke and no one knew what to do.
And it was disco and the music kind of sucked and everybody got real weird. I think that’s what happened.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, I don’t doubt that at all.
JOE ROGAN: That’s when the clothes get really f*ed up.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: It is exact time. Because before, there was a hippie style. Hendrix and Clapton, a lot of guys. It was like a flowy hippie, but it looked good. It was kind of cool.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Sure.
JOE ROGAN: But something happened in the ’70s, we just lost all perspective.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, I know. I mean, when you look at some of the ’70s, especially late ’70s, the disco era and stuff like that, and you look back at some of these TV shows they had, and you see a lot of these bands and stuff on there and it’s like, who thought that looked good? I mean, who said this is the thing now. It looked like garbage. I mean, horrible, horrible stuff.
Muscle Cars and the Golden Age
JOE ROGAN: Why? I talk about this all the time, but it’s the cars too, man. I love 1960s muscle cars, but I check out around ’71, and I only allow ’71 Barracuda and a Challenger in that group. Everything else after ’71 is useless. Oh, yeah, except Corvette. Corvette still stayed cool looking. They stayed cool looking deep into the ’80s.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I’m a muscle car guy. I’ve got a ’67 Chevelle 396.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, nice.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And muscle cars are my thing.
JOE ROGAN: I have a ’70.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, do you really?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I would like to get a ’64 GTO. The first year they were made. That’s what I’m looking for. But to get one that’s perfect, they’re pretty pricey.
JOE ROGAN: They’re very pricey.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And I grew up poor, so I don’t like to buy stuff for myself. I buy my kids stuff all the time. And I don’t mind how much money I spend on my family, but for me, I just don’t spend money on myself.
JOE ROGAN: Old habits die hard.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, they really do.
JOE ROGAN: When I was a kid, my sister’s boyfriend’s brother, the older brother was the cool guy in the neighborhood. He had a ’65 GTO convertible. And he would, I used to, I worked at a gas station, and he would drive by the gas station. We’d all go like this, like…
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Can’t believe he owns that. That’s really his car. He was the coolest guy in the world.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah, we had those.
JOE ROGAN: Terry Red.
The Boxmasters Origin Story
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Oh, that was, there was a guy named Mike Page in our town. He was older than my group. When we were seniors, he was probably already 25, 26, something like that. And you never really, because cruising was a thing. And you’d cruise through Sonic or whatever it was, and see who was there and all that.
And everybody parked on the bank parking lot and you’d drink beer and then the cops would come by and you’d hide all your things. And I mean, it was literally like the “American Graffiti” days.
And so this guy Mike, he had a ’65 candy apple red Vet, and he had a Mustang. Remember Chuck Negron, singer in the Three Dog Night? The one with the mustache?
JOE ROGAN: Yes.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: He looked like Chuck Negron. So we would see him pass by, and he was like, Harrison Ford was in “American Graffiti.” It’s like, you just see him in his car. And so it was like seeing Elvis Presley go by and everybody go like, wow. And that’s actually how the Boxmasters’ name came about.
JOE ROGAN: Really?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: How?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, in the south in those days, there are two stories how the Boxmasters’ name came about. There’s the politically correct one, and there’s the one that’s not. And the one that’s not is if somebody was a playboy type, he was called a Boxmaster.
And so, and we had a, I would have never guessed that. Yeah, that’s hilarious. And in the old days, people would say, “Oh, look, there goes the Boxmaster,” when Mike would pass by, because he just knew. But you only saw him driving his Corvette up and down, cruising. You never saw him actually doing stuff. And he never got out and drank beer with us or anything.
JOE ROGAN: He was just making an appearance.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Just letting everybody know, look at this second generation Corvette.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: ’65. I have a ’65 convertible.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I love them.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Awesome cars. I mean, yeah. Muscle cars are the thing to me. Do you remember there are two sort of car times that confused me. I mean, first of all, how can a Mustang ever not be cool? But remember in the late ’70s, early ’80s, it may as well have been a Ford Fiesta. Yeah. It was garbage. What was that?
The Gas Crisis and Car Design
JOE ROGAN: It was the gas guzzler. The gas price crisis.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, okay.
JOE ROGAN: That’s what it was. So they had to make all these cars gas efficient. So they got rid of V8s. They started having these very economical on gas V6s and really crappy engines. And they made the cars plastic and lighter and cheaper. And yeah, they f*ed everything up.
They fed everything up. Like the fact whoever, imagine working at Ford 1969. You got the Mach 1, which is, you just look at that and go, God d.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Every time.
JOE ROGAN: You see. To this day, I see one of those on you, they just nailed it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: You just stare at that car, just walk around it for hours just looking at it, and then 10 years later, they got something that you would never want to own.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No, this is a hunk of garbage.
JOE ROGAN: This is a f*ing box. This is literally like a box that a washing machine comes in.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Garbage.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: People didn’t even want to steal them. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Crazy. Imagine being the CEO of that company going, what did we do? What the f* happened? We had it. We had magic, right? Like legit magic.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Remember the Toronado and the Riviera?
JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, you talk about different looking.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And…
JOE ROGAN: But they’re cool.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They’re very cool.
JOE ROGAN: Very cool. Weird and huge.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And huge.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And the opposite end of the spectrum was AMC. What were they thinking?
JOE ROGAN: They were weird. That was a weird car to own.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Weird. All of those.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They had one that looked kind of okay, but they had the Pacer and the, what was it? What was that other weird looking, the Gremlin. Yeah, all those kind of things. I mean, it was like, what in the hell is this?
JOE ROGAN: It was a strange company. It was almost like a fake company.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Like, it didn’t make any sense.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It didn’t make any sense at all.
JOE ROGAN: It was like an Australian. Remember, like Mad Max. He drove that Australian muscle car. I remember watching him. What the f* is that thing? It was an Australian muscle car. I don’t know what it was still to this day.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Don’t know what it was.
JOE ROGAN: But that’s like what those AMCs were. They were weird looking. Just off.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Strange.
JOE ROGAN: Strange looking from a different timeline or something.
Classic Films and Cultural Reflections
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, there was a movie called, it had Raquel Welch was in it and Donald Pleasance and all these people called “Fantastic Voyage” where some politician or scientist or something. I guess it was an assassination attempt, but there was a brain thing. So they shrink all these scientists down on a little glass thing, whatever those things are called for chemistry or whatever. They shrink the cats down and their little submarine thing and they shoot them into the guy. Yeah, that. Well, see, that’s a Pacer.
I used to watch it. I go, that’s a damn Pacer. Yeah. And so they go through the guy, all through his veins and arteries and stuff and get to the place where they need to fix it and all this kind of stuff. But antibodies kept attacking them and all this kind of stuff. It was weird. I saw it in the theater and I was pretty impressed, actually.
JOE ROGAN: I remember that movie. That’s hilarious.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s hilarious.
JOE ROGAN: Shrinking people down. What’s wild is how many ideas were burned up in movies by the time, like the 90s rolled around. If you just stop and think about the fact that movies really were only like movies, I think, are the absolute best mirror into the culture. It’s like a time machine.
You could read a history book, and you can kind of get a rough understanding of how people behaved back then, but you still think of them in a current context. You think of them like today. But you watch a film, you know, watch a James Cagney film, and you’re like, whoa, man, this is a different world.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Nobody knew shit.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: Nobody had any idea what was going on in the world. You got all your news from the newspaper. So these dudes who own the newspapers essentially control the narrative for the entire world.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: And it’s, and it’s, people behave strange.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Open.
JOE ROGAN: Domestic violence. Domestic violence. Normal. Shut up.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: She would kiss him and, like, it was crazy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, right.
JOE ROGAN: Nuts.
Growing Up Rough
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, my wife, who was raised in the Bay Area, around San Francisco, Marin County there, when I first told her what my dad did to me, she was like, oh, my God. That’s like, and honestly, that’s what everybody’s dad did. It was like, if he was working graveyard shift and you started making a bunch of damn noise at noon, you got your ass beat with a belt.
And she was just, she couldn’t believe it. I said, oh, no. It was like every day almost, and, not that it was good, but it was just part of our life. We didn’t know any better. We really didn’t.
JOE ROGAN: No. No one knew any better. And we’re only figuring it out now.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: It was like canceling people retroactively for stuff they did in the 80s. Like, that’s a different world. You weren’t even alive then. That’s a different world. When people came, like, you got to realize, like, your parents. Like, think about it this way. People were coming over on a boat from other countries with no knowledge of what was over here. They just got told, oh, there’s jobs in America, and you got on a boat from f*ing Europe.
Like, my grandparents came over here in the 1920s. Like, they had no idea. They come over here, and there’s a bunch of people that also did the same thing. And they’re basically just savages. They’re basically like one, one or two steps above, like, absolute savages. They’re savages with metal. They’ve got metal and rubber.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right?
JOE ROGAN: And they’re raising kids. And of course they’re going to raise kids in a rough way, because the world is rough. It’s like, everybody got beat up. It was normal. Like, bullying was not, there was no anti-bullying campaigns. You just had to fight for yourself. Like, that’s just how it is. This is life. This prepares you for life. It sucks, but this is life.
Small Town Protectors
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. We have guys in our town that you just stayed away from. Yeah, I mean, guys who were, relatively the same age. And I lucked out because, I was a skinny, long haired little hippie and playing in bands and stuff. And for some reason I always liked hanging out with the guys who are a few years older than me. They had more fun than we did.
And so I remember the first time I ever, well, the first time I ever had a drink of beer, my uncle Don, he drank Schlitz. And this was back when you had to have a church key and you opened both sides of it.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And he would pour it in our glasses. Like I said, we were pretty poor. We all lived at my grandmother’s house. And it was the jelly jars, when you finished the jelly, that became the glasses we drank out of. And he would have a jelly jar, glass of beer, and it just looked like apple juice to me. And I would always ask him, six years old, I’d say, hey, can I have some of that? And he goes, you don’t need any of this.
Well, finally one day he goes, yeah, here, have a drink. Tastes like apple juice. And I like, oh, God, mighty. But the first time I got drunk in my life was on Boone’s Farm wine, apple wine. And these two guys, Gary and Eddie were their names and they were just trouble. And Gary had a 64 GTO. That’s probably where I got that thing from. But I mean, we rolled it one night. No seatbelts. I mean, we never even thought about a seat belt.
And so they took me to the Dairy Queen and we were going to get a hamburger or whatever it was. Well, they ended up like hanging me out the window, just puking all over the Dairy Queen parking lot because I drank an entire bottle of this and never been drunk in my life. I was 12, 13. And so these guys, I was fascinated by them. They were all James Dean and Elvis Presley to me, right?
And there were a few guys in town that everybody knew not to mess with at all. It’s like they will literally pull your eyeballs out of the sockets. They kind of consider me a mascot and they all protected me. So the other guys who were, pricks or whatever, if one of them messed with me, there was a guy named Calvin, a guy named Billy Bob actually, who was probably 10 years older than me and a guy named Harry and whose family came over from somewhere. They were like, from the Czech Republic or somewhere. But they grew up here, so they didn’t sound like they were from someplace else.
Harry was about 5’6″ and stocky. And there was this dude who was just mean to everybody. Excuse me, but somewhere in between our age, when we’re teenagers, 17, 18, and Harry and Billy Bob and Calvin and those guys, they were like 30. And there are these other guys who were the mean guys in town who were in between those ages. And they were the real problem because they were just assholes. They weren’t, the other guys were cool as long as you didn’t mess with them.
One night, this guy, two of them were both named Steve, who were the real pricks. And one of the Steves got me by my hair and dragged me around, beat me up a little bit. And I was a fighter, I wasn’t bad. I fought a lot of guys. I quit fighting my early 20s. But back then, it was just a way of life. And this cat roughed me up, a lot bigger than me.
And Harry found out about it. Well, we had a bonfire party out at a guy’s trailer home that night. And so this cat that had beat me up showed up. And Harry had heard about it. And Harry’s, I’m like Harry’s little mascot guy, right? So the guy gets out of his car and comes over there. Now we got a big bonfire going on, right? The guy comes over. Harry didn’t say a word to him. He walked up to him. This guy’s like a foot taller than Harry. Harry got him, reached up, got him by the hair, hit him one time, broke his jaw and threw him in the bonfire.
JOE ROGAN: Whoa.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And a bunch of people had to put him out. I mean, this was just like a Friday night in Arkansas.
Cultural Violence and Heritage
JOE ROGAN: Oh my God. That’s a rough part of the world, man. Especially back then. Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell, he wrote a book about, like, where he was talking about why certain populations, like certain parts of the world are rougher. And he was talking about certain parts of America where they were settled initially by people that came from a herding community. So they were like sheep herders in other countries.
And when they came over to America, when you have a flock of sheep, someone could steal all your food in the middle of the night. They can just take all your sheep. If you’re growing corn, it’s hard to pick all that f*ing corn. You got to throw it in a truck, drag it out. You could just steal someone’s sheep. So they’re accustomed to extreme violence to protect their sheep. And they’re accustomed to acting fast and doing things quickly and violently.
And so that’s how you got the Hatfields and the McCoys. Yeah, that’s what that shit’s about. People like, why are those people such f*ing psychos? They came from a psycho community in Europe, and then when they made it over to America, they just kept that tradition going.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, for sure.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, people talk about, the Irish and the Scots.
JOE ROGAN: Did I say Michael McDowell? Did I say Malcolm? Malcolm Gladwell? That’s what I meant. Malcolm Gladwell. Sorry. Malcolm. Malcolm Gladwell.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s early, but that’s, we still, to this day, we talk about, oh, yeah, those Irish cats and the Scottish guys, the English guys. If you’re in the, like, say, South London or whatever, some rough guys over there. Where do you think we came from? I mean, I did one of those tests about my genealogy and all that kind of stuff.
And, you hear stuff from your family growing up that I grew up thinking I was part Italian and Native American and all these different things, right? And then I do this thing. It’s like I’m a full on English, Scottish guy. It’s Irish, English, Scottish. Almost all of me, except for, as my daughter says, she goes, “Daddy, why are we randomly Swiss?” I got a little bit of French Swiss, it’s like 11%, something like that. The rest of it’s just that stuff.
So all those people come over here and North Carolina or Tennessee, Arkansas, all these places. There are words that we use, which, we call the hillbilly language, which actually wasn’t considered a hillbilly language in England, but that language was left over. Like, we say, “Reckon you want to go do something?” Reckon over there. They still use it.
Southern Dialect and Language Origins
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Aaron, meaning one. It’s like, if you said to me, hey, can I have a beer? And I say, I ain’t got Aaron. You know, it’s A I R. I ain’t got Aaron. And all that stuff came from England and Ireland and Scotland.
JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the idea of the Southern accent, right? The Southern accent is an English accent just morphed in a new place.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
The Hookworm Epidemic and Southern Stereotypes
JOE ROGAN: And morphed particularly probably because of the climate. The climate changed a lot. One of the weirder things about these stereotypes about the south is the hookworm thing. Do you know that thing?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No. Tell me about that.
JOE ROGAN: Okay. This is crazy. So for a long time, a giant percentage of people that lived in the south had hookworm. And hookworm is a parasite that you get in your feet from walking around barefoot.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Okay.
JOE ROGAN: And hookworm affects your cognitive function in a massive way. It makes you slow and stupid. And so this myth of the Southern person being slow and lazy and stupid was all because they were infected with hookworm. A giant percentage of these people had hookworm. Throw that into our sponsor perplexity and tell me how much hookworm was in the South.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I’m going to cancel my therapist.
JOE ROGAN: The phrase hookworm Southern drawl refers to historical connection between hookworm infections in the American south and certain stereotypes about Southerners, including the way they spoke and behaved. In the late 19th and early 20th century, hookworm infestations were rampant, with estimates suggesting that up to 40% of the people in the region were affected.
So hookworm causes symptoms like severe fatigue, anemia, and mental fog, which led to slowness in speech and thought. This contributed to the stereotype of southerners being lazy or slow witted, often associated with the southern drawl. How did they fix that? Some sort of a dewormer. Health campaigns.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean I’ve heard of hookworm, but I had no idea that it had any association with this.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I didn’t either. When I found that out, I was like, oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. Rockefeller Sanitation Commission surveyed infection rates 40% mobile dispensaries traveled throughout the region. Free deworming medications and educating local doctors. Okay, so they use some sort of an anti parasitic. All measures including latrines, to improve sanitation, educating communities about the risk of soil contamination and encouraging the routine of wearing shoes. Isn’t that nuts? That shoes probably fixed it more than anything. People wearing shoes probably.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: So that’s where it all came from. That’s the hookworm thing.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s wild.
JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that nuts? It is nuts because when I was a kid, I mean to this day when someone wants to make a stereotype about someone being stupid, they use a southern accent.
Hollywood’s Southern Prejudice
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it’s true all the time. Yeah, I grew up with that. I mean there was a prejudice in Hollywood when I first got out there. There still kind of is. I mean, especially coming up now, once you reach a certain level, you can walk into Universal Studios and say I want to play Bette Davis. They’re all hey, that’s a great idea.
But when you’re coming up, the first thing I ever auditioned for in LA was a student film. It was one of those USC student films. And I go in there and the part was some guy that just got off the turnip truck from Alabama. And I thought, well, I’ve probably got this. And so I was broke and everything and it wasn’t going to pay anything, but I didn’t care. It was like, well, maybe I get my foot in the door because I didn’t go to be an actor anyway. I just thought, well, try this stuff.
And I go in there and I think the casting person and the director are both east coast people, like New York or somewhere. And I did my little audition and they said, can you do it more Southern? And I’m like, are you shing me? It’s like, you got to be shing me. I said, well, what you have to understand is I actually did just get off the truck from back there and this is how you talk.
And of course, my accent is not as thick as it was then, but they just said I wasn’t Southern enough. And it was like, oh, I see what they’re getting at.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So they wanted the Foghorn Leghorn. Now over here, what we have is. And I never heard anybody talk. I grew up down there. I never heard that. And so that’s what they would do. There are a lot of performances over the years where people who are not from the south played the part that actually use that accent and they win Academy Awards and stuff. And I’m like, wow.
So anyway, I didn’t get this part. And the guy who got the part literally sounded like he was in the Bronx, but he was doing that thing. I thought, wow, this is going to be tough out here. But Southerners don’t often get picked or even noticed for things. Let’s say you’re doing a gangster movie in the 30s in New York, even if you can do the accents, whatever. But people from New York can get parts playing Southerners, that still goes on.
JOE ROGAN: That’s so weird. Yeah, that’s such a weird stereotype. It exists in music too, doesn’t it?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: For sure.
Southern Rock and Musical Stereotypes
JOE ROGAN: Southern bands. Until Skynyrd came along, Southern bands got no respect.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Skynyrd f*ed that up. Just because they were so good. They were so good. I was like, all right, man. Yeah, Freebird is Freebird, right? That guitar solo, you’re like, ridiculous.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s ridiculous. I’ve known those guys a long time. Those guys in Skynyrd. Yeah, it’s. You’re right. That whole. And also anybody that was from the south got lumped into the Southern rock thing. And they weren’t all just people that sounded like Charlie Daniels. I mean, there were very, very different types of bands.
The Allman Brothers combined jazz and blues and rock and pop and everything. And their music, they were literally masters. The Allman Brothers. Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East. Probably the best live album ever made. But they just say they’re all Southern rock bands. It’s like, man, it wasn’t really like that.
JOE ROGAN: Very different styles.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Very different styles.
JOE ROGAN: The Allman Brothers were masters.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They were.
JOE ROGAN: Midnight Rider’s still one of my all time favorite songs.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, it’s awesome.
JOE ROGAN: But if I used to have to do radio when I lived in LA, I’d do morning radio. I’d smoke a joint before I left the house, it was like 5:30am I’d listen to Midnight Rider in the dark on the way there.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a brilliant song.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s so good. It just gets you in the mood.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And country guys, back in those days when country was actual country music, they would hear some of these songs by those kind of guys, like the Allman Brothers or Marshall Tucker, whoever it was, and cut them for country albums like Waylon Jennings did. Midnight Rider did a great cover.
But yeah, it’s kind of odd being raised in the area of the country that people look at as the armpit and then you have. And like I said, once you overcome that within the business and it’s not like they like you any better, it’s just that they can use you to make money with. And once that happens, then you can go in and play Bette Davis.
Coastal Elitism and Flyover States
JOE ROGAN: That’s the stereotype of the coastal cities, right? It’s the stereotype that comes out of New York and LA where everything else is stupid. You’re in New York or you’re in LA and all these retards in the middle, that’s the flyover states. I literally would call it the flyover states.
And when you’re in control of casting all the great films and all the great television shows and you decide what the great albums are, you dismiss the people that are. It takes an undeniable talent where they go, okay, I don’t give a f* where that guy’s from.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: From.
JOE ROGAN: Let that guy f*ing play. Like that guy’s got voodoo in his hands. Whatever he’s doing, I don’t care where he’s from. But other than that, they would look at these places like they were less than or that the people were not as bright. And that stereotype still exists today.
I remember one of the good things about traveling and doing the road a lot as a stand up is you get to perform all over the country and meet all these different people. And when I would talk to people about Texas in particular, I’d be like, dude, I fing love it there. They’re the most fun people. It’s so fun. And they’re normal. They’re normal people. They’re not Hollywood people angling to try to get some sort of a social relationship with you so they can progress their career. They’re just cool people, just regular fing people.
And the problem is that these people in these coastal cities are the ones who don’t know that. And they’re dictating the narrative for the entire country based on some very weird prejudices. Very weird.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No, it’s true. I mean, it happens all the time. And people ask me, there was a very famous singer, movie star person. This is a long time ago. It was when I first started getting invited to the parties, and I didn’t know anything about this stuff.
JOE ROGAN: What year was this around?
Early Hollywood Experiences
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, it was around the time of Sling Blade. I mean, I was working and had done some stuff that had been noticed, like One False Move and done a few things. But this was around that time and it wasn’t even out yet, I don’t think. But screenings had started happening and there’s a buzz about it, right?
So I get invited to a party and it was out at David Foster’s house. He was always real nice to me. And at the time he was married to Linda Thompson, who was a Memphis girl, and she always made southern food and she kind of took a liking to me and said, hey, I want to invite you because you’re from the south and we always have the southern food at our.
So I go out there and there were a lot of big people there and I found myself outside having a smoke. And I was standing there in a little group of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson. And I think maybe Dan Aykroyd was there. And I remember Lionel Richie was in there playing piano in the living room. And I’m just like, wow, wait, this is crazy.
But I felt it’s like that poor kid from the south syndrome, like I don’t really belong here. So I was real shy and that kind of thing. Well, I went into the kitchen to get another drink and this, like I said, I won’t name her name, but a very famous singer and actress from back in the 60s and 70s. And she very seriously said to me, she said, so this Sling Blade. So sorry. She goes, it’s fascinating to me.
A lot of people who didn’t know me before that thought that I was actually that guy. It’s like this mentally challenged guy made a movie and everything like that, and they would meet me and they’d go, you’re the guy in that.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
The Hollywood Outsider Experience
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So anyway, but she said it was fascinating to me. And she goes, “And you came out here from what is it, Alabama or something like that?” And I said, “Arkansas.” And she goes, “Arkansas.” And with a straight face said to me, “What do you people do down there?”
I was like, wow. And I said, thinking she’d get the joke, I said, “We mostly lay around on the porch with our hound dog and swat flies.” She goes, “Oh, interesting, interesting.” It’s like, babe, I was f*ing with you there. But that was one of the moments where I realized that I really was an outsider out there.
And people ask me about my longevity in this business, and I always say, because I stay out of it. I tell people, do your acting on the red carpet, not in the movie. They say, “Well, you’re so natural and stuff.” It’s like, that’s from ignorance. I don’t know anything about acting. I didn’t go to Shakespeare school and stuff.
I look at the thing, I’m playing Tommy Norris in Landman, or I’m playing the guy in Goliath or Fargo or Sling Blade or Monster’s Ball, whatever I was at. I just go out there and do what it says and be myself in whatever role it is.
The Myth of Process and Technique
Because people want to think there’s a trick to everything, that you can learn everything. And it’s kind of just not true. I mean, I believe artists, whether they’re musicians, novelists, actors, whatever they are, I truly believe that you’re born with most of it.
I’m not saying that you can’t learn and that you can’t progress, you can’t get better. I mean, just repetition makes you better. Just the more you do something, the more comfortable you get with it. But if you say, like, if you were to ask me what is my process, hell, I wouldn’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what my process is.
It’s like my process started when I was born. I just use my life experience and I do this stuff. I lived a very eclectic life, and I just remember all this stuff. I don’t need to go in the hallway before a scene and think about when my dad ran over my cat or something. And start gobbling like a turkey and yelling and screaming and punching the wall and stuff like that and trying to get all this sense memory.
My sense memory is here on the edge of my skin every f*ing minute. And I mean, if you were raised where I was, it was like, I don’t forget any of that stuff. And I’ve lived 50 different lives, so plenty to draw on.
And I just believe that people want it to sound like you’re smarter if you say, “Well, here’s how I learn lines. I take this and then I have this mathematical formula and I imagine these letters as numbers and stuff like that.” And it’s like, because the press loves that because it’s like, “What a genius.”
They don’t respect, “Hell, I don’t, I just go out there and do it” as much because people want to believe that anyone can do this. If you get in the right school, if you get the right teaching from someone, if you go study Shakespeare, whatever it is. And I just don’t believe that’s true. I believe you either have it or you don’t have it.
Natural Talent vs. Learned Skill
It’s like in music, you can learn to play guitar, you can learn to play piano, you can learn to play drums. No, I’ll take that back. You can get better at playing drums, but if you’re not born a drummer, you’re not going to be able to do it.
My brother, God rest his soul, passed away at 30. Jimmy. He was a brilliant musician. Played every instrument in the world, except when he got on my drums and he looked like he had some muscular disorder. It was like, he was just like. He goes, “How do you do this? You use all both legs and both arms.”
JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: To play everything else, everything. And he just couldn’t play drums. Drummers can get better and they get to be experts. But the thing in music that you can’t teach is feel. You can’t teach a vibe or a feel to people. Eric Clapton could play a lick on a guitar, give it to another guy, he plays the same exact lick, it’s going to sound different just because of their feel.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s how, like that Miles Davis quote about hitting notes, that everybody can hit the same notes. But it’s the attitude of the motherf*er that’s the important thing. The attitude of the person singing the notes is everything. That’s most of it. And you either have that or you do not.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No doubt about it.
JOE ROGAN: And some of it’s genetic and some of it’s just learned experience in your environment and how you grew up. But, yeah, you don’t got it, you don’t got it.
The Feel of Great Drummers
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, Levon Helm, who was a friend of mine, played drums with the Band. He and Richie Hayward, who was with Little Feat, Frank Beard in ZZ Top, especially on their earlier records. And Charlie Watts and Ringo and those guys, they all had feel. They had a thing.
And then there are these other drummers in these sort of, I call them science bands, where the drummer has like 75 drums and they can do shit that seems humanly impossible. But what happens after the song’s over? It doesn’t stick.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You know what I mean? But Levon just playing on a little four piece kit, just had that feel and he played the song. So anytime musicians start thinking it’s all about their thing, like if you’re doing movies, the prop people think you need 11 watches on each arm. It’s like about your department, everything. Five briefcases and watches everywhere and shit. And it’s like, no, I’ll just take an old Timex with a round face. I’m good.
But it’s when musicians start thinking that they have to make their part cut through and be noticed. The best drummers, you don’t really notice them. You hear the song. If you go in there and dig deep and listen to them, if you isolate them and just listen to that, you’re like, “Oh, okay, listen to that cat.”
But in a perfect world, all you hear is the singer singing and telling you what they’re trying to say. And the music is so good behind it that it’s just part of it. You don’t really notice it.
JOE ROGAN: And you can’t teach that. It’s the feel thing. And you know it when you hear it. When a song just, oh, yeah, it just gets in there, you’re like, you guys nailed it. You put it together, you f*ing nailed it.
And the amazing thing about bands and how long have the Boxmasters been around now?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You’ve been around for 20 years.
The Challenge of Staying Together
JOE ROGAN: 20 years. The most amazing thing is that people get together and they stay friends for that long. And with all the conflicts and all the ego and all the bullshit and you manage, you know, you hang out like that.
To me, when someone makes great music, it’s the most impressive thing is not just that you make great music, but you make great music with people that all get along together with all these different creative minds and egos and weirdness. Everybody’s weird. Every fing creative person I’ve ever met is out of their fing mind.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And you get all together and then you show up at practice at the same time, you rehearse together, you actually do it and you show up for gigs and you perform, you hit your notes on stage, you can all stay friends. That’s the most important thing and the most rare thing and the most impressive thing.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. And with our band in particular, I mean, before that, I played in a million bands and had a solo band that did four major label solo records. And that’s where I met some of the guys where it rolled over into the Boxmasters.
J.D. Andrew, specifically, who’s still, he and I are the longest running members. We started the band together and he and I still run it. And we’re the opposite of what normally happens. Normally a band, when they’re younger, they hit it for a while, three or four years, maybe have a couple of hits or at least some things that people know about. And then as the years go on, you start to dwindle a bit, unless you’re the Rolling Stones or the Who.
We just opened for the Who on our last tour, which was awesome.
JOE ROGAN: Wow.
From Musician to Actor and Back
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And so this band has started as, it’s like, I got this crap about it’s always an actor who wants to be a musician, just like this guy and that guy. And it’s like, no, no. I was a musician who came to LA to play music, accidentally became an actor, and next thing you know, I made $381 on an episode of Matlock with five lines and I’m like, I’m broke, I better do this. That’s how I became an actor.
JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And so one way or the other, we started out fighting that stigma for 10, 12 years. And then all of a sudden it started to go away because we got more and more fans and became a big underground band and in the last five or six years, got really popular.
So here we are, old guys who are still making it, who are still on their way up at our age. So it kind of went the other way around with us. And you’re right. I mean, to stick around that long, especially when it took us a while to get success, to make any money at it, and to get the fan base we have now.
Fighting the Actor-Musician Stigma
JOE ROGAN: Is there a weird thing, too, about people like critics or people that are paying attention to the music, that don’t just listen to the music and see you guys perform? Instead, they think, “Oh, that’s Billy Bob, the movie star who’s trying to be a musician.”
So there’s this, like, stigma to it. So instead of, like, looking at you and go, “Oh, it’s a cool band. Oh, I like them. This is great.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s that f*ing Sling Blade guy, right? Yeah. Billy Bob’s trying to do something different. He wants to be a rock star.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s what we put up with for about half of our career with the Boxmasters. Not as much anymore. That kind of goes away. It goes away with the public, with the audience, with some of the critics. It’s still there because they want to say that about you. It has nothing to do with your music. It has to do with, “Here’s my angle for this article.”
JOE ROGAN: Yes.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: My angle in this. I mean, I did an article with a magazine one time that was kind of more of a men’s magazine. Talked about music the whole time and talked about sex for about three minutes. The whole article’s about sex. So that’s what they did, because that’s their vibe.
So anyway, when they say this stuff, they’re saying it because they want to dig at you. And if musicians, famous musicians are at one of our shows, unless it’s ones who are friends of ours, if they want to come back and meet us after the show and say hello, they’ll come back there.
And most people wouldn’t take this as an insult, but it is. They’ll come back and they’ll say, “Hey, it looks like you’re really having fun up there.” Which means, “Oh, isn’t it cute? You got a little hobby and you’re having fun up there, and you get to be a rock star.” That’s what they mean by it. And I just kick them the f* out of the dressing room.
I mean, I’m not joking. There was a very famous guy came back to see us in Dallas one time, and he came back and he goes, “You know, it’s really nice you get to do this.” I said, “Get to do what?” And he said, “You know, get to go out on the road and stuff and get this part out of you and get to have fun up there and stuff like that.”
I said, “Well, you know, I have some songs about suicide. I said, you think that’s fun? I said, it’s not fun. I’m writing about shit from my soul that I grew up in. I’m also writing things that are hopeful songs. I’m writing a lot of stuff here. We write original music and perform it, and people love this band.”
I said, “So don’t ever f*ing come near me again. Don’t ever come to one of our shows again if all you want to do is come back here because you’re pissed that we just had a record on the radio. You were in a band from 30 years ago, and now you’re playing places that are smaller than where we are, so don’t come back there and start that shit with me.”
And I actually, he said, “Oh, no, no, dude. I’m just saying it really looked like…” I said, “Get the f* out of here. I don’t care who you are.” And so.
JOE ROGAN: Well, you know when someone’s digging at you.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You know when someone’s saying, “That was a great show. Looks like you guys are having fun.” They’re smiling and laughing. “That was f*ing great. I loved it. I loved it.” And then, you know, “Oh, it looks like you’re having fun up there.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, right.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, you’re a c. Okay, okay. C. Yeah. Some people just love to do that. They just want to dismiss.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Fans think you’re so dumb and you have no memory that some of the people who come to your shows to get stuff signed, which, you know, a lot of them, they’re not even. Well, they’re selling them, you know.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And in certain cities, like in Kansas City, we’re like the Beatles. I mean, there are just certain cities where we sell out the second it goes on sale and stuff like that. You got good places and places that aren’t as good, you know, no rhyme or reason to it sometimes.
But there are people who come up to me that I’ve seen at shows before. And I mean, if it’s a guy that’s just this average looking guy, you may not remember them, but if it’s a guy who’s 6’11” and has red hair with this giant nose and two teeth, you remember that guy. I saw this guy last year, you know, and so I’ve actually had them come up to me and say one of their favorite things to say is, “Oh, it’s so funny. We can’t wait to come see your show tonight. We didn’t even know you had a band.”
They love to say that. It’s like, well, you obviously didn’t see every TV show we’ve done. You didn’t see, you know, me talking about it on the Today show or whatever I’m on. You know, this has been going on a long time. Yeah, you knew that. But they want to say that to you, right?
JOE ROGAN: To dismiss you.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And so I’ve actually had guys on this tour. A guy came up to me who’s been to three of our shows. I know he was there and he’s always in the front. On the third time, he comes up to me and he goes, “Yeah, man, this is really, really cool and everything. Will you sign these bunch of pictures from Bad Santa? I didn’t even know you had a band.”
It’s like, well, the first time you came, maybe you didn’t, but then the second time you came, I think you probably remembered. And then last year when you were here, and now you’re here today. So I think you probably do by today that we have a band, you know, but people love. We’re in a society now where nobody wants to. It’s a “get me” society. They’re going to get you.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And however they can get you, they want to get you. And nobody likes to see people succeed. When I was playing the Carl in Sling Blade, every critic in the world loved me. And then all the other ones, A Simple Plan. I’m playing this poor, pathetic wretch and all this kind of stuff, you know, the second I got to, you know, have a love scene with somebody and I was a leading man, all of a sudden it’s like, “Wait a minute, you’re not one of us. Where’d the hump on your back go?” And all that shit, you know, it’s like.
And it’s like, you actually look better in this movie than you did now. “What did you have, plastic surgery or whatever it is?” And so once you start to succeed, that’s when they start to want to say shit to you.
The Pressure of Success and Public Perception
JOE ROGAN: People love watching people fail at things because it takes away the pressure that they have in their own life, their lack of success. If they could watch a great man fall. What’s a funny thing is the dismissal of your music. They can’t dismiss you as an actor or your accomplishments, so they try to dismiss you as, “Oh, this is a thing you’re kind of doing. You wish you were a rock star. This is the thing you can’t possibly be. Also a musician. You’re just an artist, and you do things that are cool that you enjoy doing.” No, that’s not possible.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: “Why is this ugly f* married to Angelina?” You know, that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, and, you know, not that I disagree, but it’s normal.
JOE ROGAN: I get it. I would be thinking that way, too, if I was 16. You know, when I was a kid, I’d be like, “F* that guy.” Yeah. You know what I mean?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I remember when I first saw pictures of you with Angelina Jolie. I didn’t think that, though. I was like, “F* yeah, dude.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: We’re supposed to root for each other.
JOE ROGAN: Yes. You know, you can look at something and be like, “Oh, f that guy. Why is that guy?” Or you could look at the same thing and go, “F, yeah. Way to go, dude.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: That’s awesome. And then you feel good, and he feels good and everybody feels good, and maybe you’re inspired to do better for yourself. Like, I wish I was a little bit more like that guy. I got to maybe discipline myself a little more, get my shit together, get something going, you know, instead of fing. “That guy sucks. Fing overrated. That guy f*ing sucks. He’s a joke.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. “F*ing Sling Blade. Oh, he played a retard.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You’re all right. Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: The beautiful thing about Sling Blade is you did that on your own. You did that and you broke out. You, look, nobody’s giving me a chance. I was going to do something, and then everybody’s like, “Oh, my God, we love you. We love you. You did this on your own.” Yeah, but even then, you try to do something different. You try to just be a normal human. “No, no, no, no. We’re not going to be a retard. We like you as a retard.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: You’re getting a little too big. I liked it when you were underground. I liked it when nobody knew about you. I bet the Boxmasters get that too, right? “I liked you in the beginning before you guys made it.” Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: We have people who liked the first two or three albums back, you know, when we first started, which were kind of experimental albums and. But yeah, that’s a thing. It just is.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a human thing.
Too Much Exposure and Lost Mystery
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. And we do, more than ever to see people fail, I think. I mean, there was a time when we rooted for people. I think there’s also too much exposure now. I think, for instance, when we were growing up, especially in my era, if we were going to see Jimmy Stewart, we were only going to see him in the movie. And it was on film, and it had literally a film over it that made it look like you were watching something magical.
Now you got digital where you can see every f*ing mole on your face and shit, you know, and everything is a behind the scenes. “Oh, and you know, the studio’s doing this and now this group wants to come over and they’re going to do a whole thing and they want to see you on the set.” And so, but if I see Mel Gibson sitting in a director’s chair, dressed up like he was in Braveheart, talking about the movie, it’s like it takes away something from that.
It’s like we’ve had too much of a peek behind the curtain, I believe. And I think there’s, we’re too exposed. There’s too much access to people. When I was growing up in this business, I wouldn’t have dared. If I’d seen Bob Dylan or Jack Lemmon or whoever it was on the sidewalk, I wouldn’t walk up to him to say, “Jack Lemmon,” punch him in the shoulder and say, “Hey, dude, let’s get a picture.”
I mean, in a million years, I wouldn’t have done that. There’s a respect. These are my elders. They’re my heroes. And probably wouldn’t have approached them at all, but if I did, I would be, you know, very apologetic and say, “I’m so sorry, but I such a huge fan of yours.” And you still get that every now and then from decent people.
But now cats will come up to me, literally, and just, you know, just come up and grab me by the arm, say, “Dude, let’s get a picture.” The worst ones are, this is usually guys, usually more guys than women. They come up and they’ll say, “Hey, man, you’re supposed to be famous or some shit. And my wife said, you know, you’re some famous dude, you know. So I don’t really give a shit about that stuff, but can we get a picture?”
And it’s like, I put up with it for 30 years in the last couple of years, I started saying, “How about when you do give a shit, come back and we’ll get a picture,” you know, because, you know, after a while, you just can’t take it. And I’m kind of a codependent guy, so I’m nice to everybody I can be, you know, and it’s just every now and then you get a ringer and you get drunk people, men and women who just come over, they’ll come to the bus when we’re on tour and just start banging on the door and say, “Hey, you know, come out here, we got some whiskey, take a shot with us.”
And you’re just like, can you imagine doing that to Jimmy Stewart?
JOE ROGAN: Right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You know, first of all, back then you would have just thrown you in jail, you know, but there’s something about having heroes that are unattainable for you. That way they can stay in that magic spot. So I think we’ve lost magic and mystery and all these things.
Actors, Politics, and Common Sense
JOE ROGAN: Well, it certainly happens when you hear actors talk about politics. When actors become activists, it’s like, okay.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I donate to a lot of charities, mainly children’s stuff, but nobody knows it. I don’t go to the award show and talk about it when I’m getting my award. It’s like Ricky Gervais said in that skit of his, you know, he said, “Look, you know, come up here, accept your little award and f* off.”
You know, I think first of all, unless you have really studied stuff and really know about a subject fully, who the hell would want to listen to an actor or a musician talk about politics? You know what I mean? It’s like, are we supposed to follow this? I mean, if we are, what if they lead you down the wrong road?
And, you know, and politically, I’m not a. I call myself a radical moderate. I’m very strong in my opinions, but my opinions don’t belong to any political party. And, you know, I just look at what makes sense, and I think we need a common sense party in this country. That’s actually what I think we need.
JOE ROGAN: It’s just.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Just figure it out. It’s pretty easy to figure out what this is all about, you know.
JOE ROGAN: A non ideologically captured party.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yes.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That just is, okay, what do we need to do here instead of, it’s us versus them, you know. You’re seeing this a lot right now because, Mom, Donnie won in New York City and people are screaming, “We’re winning now. We’re winning.” Like, what is this “we” shit? It’s supposed to be, we are all Americans. You are all New Yorkers. You’re all we. You decided who’s going to run your city.
Now, we should all root for this guy to do a great job, for sure. And this idea that now f all these other people that didn’t vote for him. It’s not a tribe, it’s not a gang war, okay? It’s an election to see who governs your city. And once someone wins, everybody else should be like, “Okay, well, let’s hope this guy’s got some good fing plans and it works out great for everybody.” And if you don’t think like that, you’re part of the problem.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. I mean, people are pitted against each other so much these days that it’s gotten kind of ridiculous. And you’re right, it is almost like gang warfare, you know? And here’s the other thing. It’s like, we could also say, “Let’s all get along.” Well, that’s never going to happen because not everybody’s going to get along with everybody.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, even on a personal basis, I mean, you could pick any, you know, 20 people, put them in a room, and let’s all hang out together for a week and all live in the same house. You’re not going to get along with everybody. But at the end of the day, our basic principles as humans, those should all be the same with all those people.
JOE ROGAN: Yes.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You know, which, that, to me, that’s getting along.
JOE ROGAN: That’s attainable.
Social Media and Division
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It is attainable. I think that even somebody that maybe you don’t agree with their principles, if it’s just two of you sitting at a bus stop talking, it’s hard to not, just on a one-on-one basis with people, it’s hard to dislike someone that you’re stuck with for a couple hours.
You start talking, then you find out, oh, this cat doesn’t believe anything I believe. But then all of a sudden you say something like, “remember when we used to drink Tang?” And then the guy goes, “yeah, we used to drink Tang.” The next thing you know, you’re having a conversation because you grew up as just kids and humans.
JOE ROGAN: I think it’s all because of social media is a big part of it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yes, I totally agree.
JOE ROGAN: Because the division when I was a kid, I remember, like the Reagan days. There was a lot of people didn’t like Reagan, but it was never evil. It was never like this vile hatred of someone that you see today for different political parties and different politicians. And just the way we looked at one side of the country versus the other side of the country wasn’t divided like that.
I always had relatives that were, some of them were conservative and some of them were liberal, like real liberal. And everybody was like, you disagreed, but they didn’t f*ing disavow each other because you voted for the wrong person. This is bizarre. And I think that sort of insanity is just accentuated by these weird little echo chambers that people exist in that are also infiltrated by bots. So they’re not even real people. Half of them.
JOE ROGAN: So this one FBI analyst, he estimated that it might be as high as 80% of the people that are communicating online are bots on Twitter. Which is f*ing insane. Because 80% of the people getting all these other people riled up aren’t even people. It’s either AI chat bots that are run by China or Russia or even our own government. And then there’s actual farms of people that are being told to do these things.
The Entertainment Industry and Social Media
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, for sure. I mean, now people get jobs in the entertainment business because they’re in charge of, I mean, at studios and things, some 22-year-old who’s in charge of seeing who has the most followers. And they take someone and make them into a star because they got all these followers and it’s like, but they can’t do jack shit.
The talent comes, the talent is created as opposed to someone who’s talented and given the opportunity. And I think you’re right. I mean, social media has really, it sounds like the old guy chasing kids off their lawn, but it’s just the truth. I told my wife when the Internet first became a thing, way back when it first started, I said, “watch and see. This is going to ruin people’s view of each other. It’s going to ruin our society. I promise you it will.”
JOE ROGAN: You really thought that way back then? Totally. Why? What made you feel that way?
Early Internet Predictions
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Once you start opening it up to, it’s like, well, now everyone has an opportunity. They look at that as equality, as an opportunity for everyone that everyone can get on the Internet. And now everyone can do something that’s great for the people that actually had something to say or do. But then you got another 80% who have an opportunity and all of a sudden there’s someone because they decided to take pictures of themselves in the bathroom or something.
But I swear to God, I saw it all coming. And it was, it gets out of control and then AI, for Christ’s sakes. It’s fun to watch me in a Sling Blade talking like Carl, but it’s a little baby trying to order French fries. It’s funny, but if it’s used for that or if there’s some medical ways that they can use it, that’s awesome. But once you start taking jobs away from people, I mean, the workforce is going to be destroyed because of that stuff. And that’s, to me, not cool. Unless you’re going to find a way to take care of people, because it’s going to ruin the workforce. I mean, pretty soon you won’t need it for sure.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate that. But I just, I’m shocked that you picked that out early on, because I looked at it the other way. I said, this is going to give people that were outside the system, sort of like you were when you created Sling Blade. This is going to give people an opportunity to show their talent that maybe would have never gotten an opportunity to be hired by somebody, that they’ll be able to create something completely on their own.
And I read all these blogs by people that were really interesting. I was like, okay, I would have never read this guy’s book. If I just saw it in a bookstore, I wouldn’t buy it and pick it up. But I’m reading this guy’s, and he’s got very interesting insights. And he’s just some guy who’s a computer coder who lives in Missouri. And somehow or another, he’s just smart enough to figure out how to say things in a way that resonates with me. And I would have never seen this guy’s words before. And I was like, oh, this is good, because it’ll make it much more of a meritocracy. It’s like, if you have good stuff, if you have good things, good ideas, those ideas will get out.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, I agree with that. Still to this day, that too, that’s true. And in the beginning, I felt that, too. I felt, this is great. What I was afraid of was it becoming a runaway train.
JOE ROGAN: Well, clearly you were right.
The Rise of Internet Critics
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And so it was. I did love the opportunity to discover people I wouldn’t have otherwise. And I still feel that way. I still discover people on the Internet all the time. That it’s like wow, I would have never known that. So that does exist. But out of those 20%, like I said, there’s another 80% that, for instance, when I was coming up as an actor, we had like 30 critics to worry about.
It was Rex Reed and Siskel and Ebert and Jeffrey Lyons and all these people. But there was a, not a finite number, but semi-finite number of critics. I mean, you had the local ones in all the states and internationally. But now some guy named Darrell who doesn’t like you can just write a bunch of shit about you and people believe it.
You can ask people I work with on a set. Like I said, I’m codependent. I’m probably nicer to the crew even than I am the director and the producers and stuff. I mean, not that I’m not nice to them too, but I love, like, the Landman crew. Best crew I ever worked with. And I go out of my way to make sure that they’re okay every day. And they’ll tell you that. I mean, I’ve always been a decent guy on set to people. I’ve blown up maybe two or three times over. And that was always when I was directing.
But somehow you look at something on the Internet, you could be looking up, “how do you make blueberry muffins?” In some f*ing way, I’ll eventually get to something that says what an asshole I am. And when you see that thing pop up and it’s like, oh, he eats blueberries every day. And that was related to the blueberry muffin thing, in which I do eat blueberries every day. And it’s been said publicly, but then the blueberries turns into, oh, and he’s also weird because he’s afraid of antiques. And then it’s this and that and the other.
Next thing you know, I’m on a list of the top 10 actors, and I’ve seen this a couple of times, who are the most difficult to work with on set. And I’m like, how the hell did this even happen? I mean, that’s not true, but somehow somebody said something that then became widespread. And then all of a sudden, I end up on one of these lists. And the people I work with would say, God, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Appeal of Scandal
JOE ROGAN: Once again, people love to find out that someone’s secretly an asshole.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, right.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they want that. They don’t want, like, oh, he’s the sweetest guy. They want, oh, he’s a piece of shit behind the scenes. Like the Ellen thing. Ellen was all laughing and smiley, and then when everybody found out she’s actually kind of mean, they were like, oh, good. Yeah, f* her. It’s like they wanted that to be true. They were excited that it was true.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. Yeah. People love to see that.
The Power of Rumors
JOE ROGAN: It’s also rumors can just get, they just light fire. Remember the Richard Gere gerbil rumor?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I grew up in Massachusetts, and my buddy grew up in LA. And I was like, when did you hear that rumor? And he was like, and it was the same time. I’m like, so this fing rumor burned across the entire country, probably no basis whatsoever in truth, that Richard Gere had to go to the hospital, get a gerbil removed from his ass, and everybody talked about it, and poor Richard Gere is probably at home going, what the f? How did that happen?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it’s like, I’ve never even been near a gerbil.
JOE ROGAN: And every time everybody would see Richard Gere, he would go, oh, that’s the guy with the gerbil up his ass.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And they’re stamped that way forever. Nobody ever forgets it. And now with the Internet, it doesn’t go away. And if I want something taken down off the Internet, I have to prove it’s me. But the person who put it up there doesn’t have to prove who they are. Which seems kind of odd to me.
But yeah, that whole thing with Richard Gere, they want it to be true so badly that everybody you talk to who’s got the news, who said, “hey, guess what happened with Richard Gere?” And then he went to so and so hospital, and whatever it was. And then you say, nah, come on. I mean, seriously, really and truly. And they go, no, no, no. My neighbor’s cousin’s a nurse. You know how many f*ing nurses were working there that night? Thousands. Thousands of nurses were on duty. And I know somebody who knows one of them all across the country.
JOE ROGAN: Well, they want it to be true. They want it to be true because he’s too handsome. Too handsome, doing too well, too good of an actor. F that guy. Oh, he likes gerbils up his ass. Makes sense. And then the idea is that, like, you get so much pussy, just like, you get bored, you start sucking dicks, putting things up your ass, going to the hospital, GI Joe stuffed up there. So it’s just some kind of a fing rumor.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Always.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate. People think like that. They want failure.
Connecting with Fans
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And the thing with me is I like people. I really do. And people tell me I sign a lot of things and take a lot of pictures of people, and my friends will say, I have friends who won’t even look at them. You know, in the entertainment business, they’re just like, f* these guys. Just walk right by them.
And I’ll go through these press lines, I’ll sign stuff all day. And people ask me, they say, why do you do that? I say, a, they put my kids through school. That’s why, you know, I owe them, you know, some attention, you know.
And the other thing is, it’s like to them, it means something. You know, 50 years from now, somebody’s grandkid is going to have an autograph by somebody that means something to them that’s different from the people selling them. I’m talking about, you know, actual fans who want you to write it out to Uncle Albert or whoever it is, you know, and it means something to them.
And I love my fans. I mean, I always have, and I cherish them. I feel blessed every day. And I don’t. I mean, it’s emotionally exhausting sometimes, you know, because, you know, everybody wants to talk to you for a half hour a piece, and you can’t do it, but I try anyway to talk.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird position to be in.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It is.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a very weird position to be in, where they know you and you don’t know them, and everywhere you go, that’s the case. You walk. Any restaurant you walk into, oh, Billy Bob’s here. It’s like every. People want to say hi. They want to come over to your table and shake your hand and talk to you while you’ve got a mouthful of food. And it’s like.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, you know, they always want to buy you stuff. When I was broke, starving to death most of my life until the last 35 years, nobody ever bought me shit. Now everybody wants to buy me a drink. And I’m like, well, no, let me buy you guys a drink. It’s like, I don’t need you to buy me a drink now.
But then I kind of figured out that what it really is, it’s a connection. It’s not really about buying the drink. It’s an offer about. It’s an offering. It’s a friendship offering. Exactly. And that’s why you take it. Take the drink and you appreciate it.
JOE ROGAN: And occasionally you meet really cool people that way.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. I meet cool people all the time.
JOE ROGAN: All the time.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: All the time.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The problem is, it’s just like social media comments. If you read 10 Great Things about you, but then you read one like, that guy’s a piece of shit. He helps the crew, like, oh, f* you, man. And then that ruins your whole day.
Ten people saying, you’re the nicest guy they’ve ever met. We love him. He’s so, so talented and so authentic. And then one fing person, and that person gets stuck in your head. That’s the same with meeting people, you know, you can meet 10 amazing people. This is great. And one guy is like, I don’t give a shit. But my wife says, you’re somebody. F you.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And that’s what you think about.
JOE ROGAN: You sit in your hotel room smoking cigarettes. Like, f* that guy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right? Oh, it’s amazing how people can get under your skin.
JOE ROGAN: It is. You know, that’s why they do it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: That’s why I always tell comedians, post and ghost, post something and get the f* out of there. Don’t read anything about yourself. Don’t read the good and don’t read the bad. Don’t read any of it. You don’t want to know. Let them talk. Let them yap. Who cares?
The Problem with Awards
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I quit reading it several years ago. I don’t do it anymore. And I just don’t even. I don’t care about awards anymore. Good for you. I got plenty of them because I kind of got in under the wire when awards were kind of real still, you know. And I’ve won a couple recently.
But these days I just look at it as like, okay, we’re going to go over here and, you know, have some, you know, dry chicken breast and green beans, you know, and we’ll listen to people get up there and pontificate about how awesome they are and, you know.
But see, those are the ones that get me. It’s like, how about. But if you’re going to get one of these things and you truly are honored by it, well, you honor the people who gave it to you. Just them. And don’t go up there and talk about saving the badgers in Wisconsin or something. You know what I’m saying?
It’s like, there’s a time and place for that, I believe, and you should just stick to what it is and. And People would argue and say, well, no, because I have a voice and because everybody knows me. This is a great platform for me to put this out there.
Well, how about this? If you have a billion dollars and you want to save the badgers, f*ing save them. I mean, you got plenty of money to save the badgers. Trust me. That’s barely going to cut into your budget. Right, right. Right. You know what I mean?
JOE ROGAN: If that’s really your cause, talking about it is just going to annoy people. And everybody knows what you’re really doing. You’re just saying how awesome you are because you care about things.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s exactly right.
JOE ROGAN: You’re saying how special you are because you’re really concerned about people in Sudan or whatever the f* it is. It’s like a flag that you carry with you to let everybody know that you’re an amazing person.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. If you’re going to do it, just do it.
JOE ROGAN: I’ve always felt like it’s easy to say someone’s never won an award, but I always felt like awards for art are stupid.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Stupid.
JOE ROGAN: Because I don’t.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: The concept is stupid.
JOE ROGAN: If people enjoy it, that’s the reward. That’s the award. You got it, you won. People enjoyed it. You did something. They enjoyed it. Congratulations.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yes.
JOE ROGAN: And everything else is just jerking off. You know?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Like, it’s. Well, they’ve become shows. Yeah. Now it’s just about the show and it’s. You may as well be watching. What’s the one where all the, you know, pretty people live in an apartment together and that kind of stuff? Right, right, right. My buddy Rick Overton. You know Rick Overton?
JOE ROGAN: I know him very well.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I go way back with Rick. And Rick did a thing, a voiceover thing for an album of ours years ago, and he said. He was talking about. He goes, when did a dude, a regular dude sitting in a hot tub with six models become f*ing reality? But anyway, Big Brother.
JOE ROGAN: Right? Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. But it’s. And they’re all shows now, and if you. They also look you in the eye. The ones I don’t dig are like, if you didn’t, like. Let’s say you hated Landman, and you tell me that, you say, you know what? I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. I can accept that. I go, okay, sorry, you don’t dig it. Jump. We’re having a great time on it, and a lot of people like it, but I respect that.
It’s the ones who say, hey, I love your. You know, this is with journalists mostly. They’ll say it’s the best show on TV. Then you read their article in their paper, wherever it is in Sweden or wherever the f* it is, and they just rip you a new asshole. And it’s like, that’s what I don’t respect. It’s like, if you don’t like it, tell me you don’t like it right now. Don’t get me to say a bunch of shit about it.
JOE ROGAN: Exactly.
The Screen Actors Guild Experience
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And then take the piss out of it. You know, that’s what’s wrong. And. And I’ll tell you, here’s one. Screen Actors Guild. I’ve been in the Screen Actors guild since the mid-80s. I mean, a long time. I’ve done so many Q&As for SAG audiences out of all this. And these are your peers now.
Maybe if there’s an organization that gives out an award, maybe it’s political, maybe I don’t get it because they don’t like me or whatever it is. Okay, I get it. All the actors at a SAG thing will come up to me or any other actor based or entertainer based award where it’s actually your peers voting for you. If you go to the cocktail party after the Q and A, they couldn’t be further up your ass then.
Guess how many SAG awards I have all these years? I think one. And it was like a group, an ensemble deal. And I think I’ve been nominated twice, maybe three times in a 40 something year career. In this, they have given me the least notice my own cats who want to be in the movie with me. Hey, see if you can get me in. Landman, you know who you’re voting for? Adrian Brody. You know, whoever it is, whoever they voted for, it wasn’t me.
Now, I don’t give a shit. I really don’t care. When I do these Q and A’s. Now, I do it because I like talking to actors and kind of giving them some information about what we do, hearing what their questions are, what they want to know about. That’s why I do it now. Has nothing to do.
I actually have. I told an audience in Boston last year, I said, do me a favor, please don’t vote for me. I said, I’m not here to beg you for an award. So if you don’t want to vote for me, don’t let me change your mind today because this is just. I’m just talking to you guys right now. And I mean that, you know, I’m not.
JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a healthy perspective. That’s a good way to look at it, the award thing is a weird thing. I think one of my favorite award show moments was Marlon Brando when he. He didn’t want to accept his Academy Award, so he brought up this Native American woman who talked about the plight of Native Americans in America. And it turned out that wasn’t really a Native American woman. And she was a crazy person.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: Her sister outed her. She wasn’t at all Native American. She was just f*ing nuts.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, my God.
JOE ROGAN: She came up with a completely fake name, just went up there and just, like, just was a nut and just got all this attention. And she tricked Marlon Brando and she tricked all those people, and everybody’s like, you’re amaz. She’s amazing. And to me, that’s Hollywood. That. That moment is what it’s really about.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: That. And when they gave Will Smith a standing ovation after he smacked Chris Rock.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Like, okay, this is. You guys. This is.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You’re.
JOE ROGAN: You’re f*ing insane, right? You guys are nuts. You have no idea which way is north. Someone says it’s that way. Like, it’s that way. Everybody runs in that direction.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: People have been given awards that didn’t actually win because they f*ed something up, you know, and they can’t go back and say, well, actually. And it was on the show. It’s Got a Stick and that kind of thing.
But you reminded me of something that I thought was hilarious with the woman being a nut on the thing. Remember when there was a cat who was. I think it’s happened more than once now. But the original guy I saw, I think. I don’t remember exactly. It might have been somewhere in Africa, but. But some politician or somebody was giving a speech, and there was a cat acting like the sign language. Sign language guy.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: He was doing stuff that looked like he was dancing like James Brown. It was like. It had nothing to do with sign language. He would literally flip around and do things like this. It’s like, I don’t know sign language. I know that wasn’t f*ing sign language, you know?
Sign Language and Communication
JOE ROGAN: Well, sign language is also different. Everywhere you go, you know, there’s American Sign Language, there’s English sign language. It’s a completely different language, which is really weird. Yeah, yeah, it’s very strange. Yeah.
My buddy Moshe Kasher, his parents were deaf, so he can sign. And he explained to me the whole thing and how unique it is. And, you know, he can have full conversations with sign language, both alphabetically and with words. He could do anything.
But it’s American Sign Language. So if he went and tried to talk to someone in some other country, even if they speak English, they have a totally different kind of sign language.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So it’s just like actual language where if you and I go to China, we’re not. What the f* to say.
JOE ROGAN: Exactly.
Sign Language at Press Briefings
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Sign language. Yeah. Sign language is an important thing. That’s a good thing that’s happened over the last couple decades is they actually do. When there’s important information, they always have a signer there.
JOE ROGAN: I think there’s a lawsuit right now to make the Trump administration bring sign language people back to those White House press briefings.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Really?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I read something. See if you can find that. I read something about that today. I’m like, why would they take that out? Why would you remove sign language thing?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I’ve had them on comedy shows sometimes, like if you perform at some theater and there’s some sort of a mandatory requirement for a sign language person. And so there’s someone that has to keep up with the jokes and explain sarcasm while you’re in the middle.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Wow.
JOE ROGAN: It’s very weird.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s a hard job.
JOE ROGAN: Well, I always f* with the person too, because I was like, this is so crazy. You have to try to decipher that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Here it is.
JOE ROGAN: Judge orders White House to use American Sign Language interpreters at briefings. Yeah. So were there not ones ever before? No. It says they stopped when they stopped during the Trump administration term in January.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They stopped in January.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s crazy. Well, that’s not smart.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I don’t remember it much when I was growing up.
JOE ROGAN: I don’t remember it at all. I don’t remember it at all. I knew it was a thing, but I never saw it at speeches or anything like that. But yeah, it’s important.
The Fear of Stand-Up Comedy
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So can I ask you a comedy question? Because it’s always fascinated me. I mean, people have said to me before, especially if I get on a roll and I’ve had a few beers, they say you ought to do a just, you know, just for one night, just do a stand up in LA or New York or somewhere or Texas, wherever. And I’m like, it’s the scariest thing in the world to me, like, if you and I are just hanging out, you know, all of us, you know, having a beer.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You know, maybe I can be kind of funny sometimes, but to get on a stage and here’s the reason I’m afraid of it, is because if you’re doing a play, if you’re doing “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or whatever the hell it is. You don’t really know the reaction from the audience. I mean, it’s like they either love the shit out of this or they don’t get it or whatever. But you don’t know in the moment.
If you’re a stand up comic, you have one reason to be up there, and that’s to make them laugh. So if you don’t make them laugh, pretty soon you’re f*ed. And I mean, I can’t imagine bombing as a comic. And I think about different people over the years that had a very different type of comedy, you know, and like Steven Wright, for instance, perfect example.
Steven Wright, who walks out there, doesn’t say shit to the audience for a minute, takes a drink of water, and then he goes, “So last night, I accidentally put my car key into my door at my house and started my house up. I drove it around the block. Cop pulled me over and said, where do you live? I said, right here.” You know? Or he goes, he says, “I bought some powdered water, only I don’t know what to mix it with.” I mean, you know, that kind of stuff.
JOE ROGAN: So.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So this is very sort of like nobody ever did that before until he did that. And I’m like, what was it like in the beginning for that guy where people just going, what the f* are you talking about?
The Boston Comedy Scene
JOE ROGAN: Well, you know what’s interesting with him, he existed in. There’s a great documentary on comedy in Boston called “When Stand Up Stood Out.” This guy, Franz Alameda, who was a comic in Boston, created it. And it’s all about Boston, was a very unique environment in stand up, where all these comedians were just doing stand up for Boston audiences. They just, they didn’t travel, they just stayed there.
And they were some of the best guys that have ever done stand up ever. But a lot of it was regional and a lot of it didn’t translate when they left Boston. But they were so f*ing good. And there was just a giant group of them. And some of them, like Lenny Clark broke through and Jay Leno, of course, and Louis CK came out of there, Bill Burr, a lot of guys broke through, right?
But there was a core group of guys that were a part of this. There was a group that would perform at this Chinese restaurant that was also a comedy club called the Ding Ho. And the Ding Ho, I started in ’88 and it was already closed. It had closed by, I think, ’84, ’85 or something like that. The guy was a gambler, lost all the money, lost his f*ing Chinese restaurant. The place went under, but the scene still stayed.
And everybody was just about the art. There was no way to be famous. It was impossible. You were locally known, you know, so you could perform at a club and people go, “Oh, Steve Sweeney’s going to be there. We’ll all go see him.”
But when Steven Wright got on the Tonight Show, it fed it up for everybody because everybody’s like, “Why him? Why not me?” And they got mad because Steven Wright had this very bizarre absurdist act that translated perfectly to a seven minute late night, you know, Johnny Carson set. And he was the guy that broke out. He was the guy that broke out were all these fing killers, man.
And this one guy who’s just weird and absurd was fing crazy hair and all fed up, strange. “I used to work at a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.” It was like those kind of jokes, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: And he created a lot of resentment where these guys were upset that this guy who didn’t do as good as them on stage was on the Tonight Show. “What about me?” And it changed the thing that they were doing.
The Evolution of Comedy Styles
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Wow, that’s amazing. It’s like when Steve Martin first came out. I worked as a roadie, you know, for a lot of bands when I was a kid. And so, you know, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, those guys, they created a thing we hadn’t seen before, you know, from anybody.
I mean, Richard Pryor doing his stories. They weren’t jokes, they were just, he would just start talking about these people he knew and then, you know, go through his stories and Carlin coming up with all the witty stuff, you know, “Here’s some partial baseball scores. One, three, seven,” you know, like that.
And so I was privileged as a kid to watch new brands of humor come out on TV that we could see. And I was roading a couple of shows for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who I still kind of keep in touch with. And their opening act was Steve Martin, because he plays banjo. So he played banjo before the Dirt Band came out. This is when I’m a teenager.
And he did the Arrow through the Head, the whole thing, but he had kind of longer curly hair and he wore buckskin clothes and played a banjo. And there was a front of house guy named Danny Smith, who I worked for, you know, with this sound company. And I was back there at the front of house console with him and I see this guy come out and I lost my mind. I was screaming, crying, laughing, you know, with some of the shit he did, because he just came out and just said, “I’m going to do the stupidest shit you’ve ever seen in your life. And people are going to laugh.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it’s like, you know, and what, he would just do the whole, “Excuse me,” or whatever, you know. And so here’s a guy coming out, being over the top and putting arrows to his head and shit. And people couldn’t get enough of it. And before he did that, nobody else had ever done that. And all of a sudden, here you got a guy that is doing it. And that became more the norm for a while.
It’s like, it spawned a lot of other people. It’s like when we did “Bad Santa,” there hadn’t been anything like that. And the next thing you know, after “Bad Santa,” there’s “Bad Moms,” “Bad Teachers,” “Bad Grandpas,” “Bad Next Door Neighbors,” you know, “Bad Guy Who Works as a Dry Cleaners,” you know, and so. And those will last for several years, you know, where people are kind of getting that in their heads and naturally they’re influenced by it. And that brand lasts for a while.
JOE ROGAN: Like “Yellowstone.” There’s probably “Yellowstone” type ideas that get pitched after that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
Steve Martin’s Decision to Quit Stand-Up
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Steve Martin got so big that he decided to quit. So he was doing standup and he was like, “I lost all of that touch with the audience because anything I said was funny. I lost what’s real and what’s not real.” He was too big. And so he decided to not do it anymore. Which is insane, right. Because you really think about it like this. The thing that he loved.
And he was at the time one of the only acts that was doing arenas. I mean, he was probably one of the first comedians of all time to do these huge places. And people would come to see him and it was this variety act. It was part, you know, “King Tut.” The “King Tut” song.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, for sure.
JOE ROGAN: “Let’s get started.” It was just so unique. And he just decided to step away from it and just do movies.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it’s so wild because, you know, when you mentioned that thing about the big arenas and stuff. Another thing that’s scary to me about comedy is if you’re not in a room where everybody gets every nuance, that would scare me. I mean, to be, you know. Of course he was that big, and it was a big thing where people could see the big movements and stuff. But, you know, Lewis Black, right?
JOE ROGAN: Sure.
Lewis Black and Festival Shows
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Lewis Black was, we played. This is probably, you know, at least a decade ago, probably more. And we played it in Milwaukee at County Stadium. And it was a biker rally deal we were playing at. And we came on before Kid Rock. So we play our set, there were 250,000 people at this thing.
JOE ROGAN: Wow.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it was like, you know, half a Woodstock. And so we went out there and, you know, had a great show. We come off and everything. Well, Lewis was there. So aside from the main giant stage where the concerts are going on, they have one of those blow up tents, you know, the ones where the sound’s never good in there. And you know, it looks like the Dallas Cowboys training facility tent or whatever it is like that.
So Lewis comes by the bus to say hey and we talk for a few minutes. And I knew him from the Sunset Marquee. He would be in the bar there sometimes in LA. And so we’re talking and I said, “Yeah, man, huge crowd out there.” He goes, “No, you guys are awesome. You don’t have anything to worry about out here. They loved you.”
He goes, “Try doing comedy in a blow up tent with people in folding chairs.” He goes, “That’s not fun,” you know, and especially with a guy like him whose whole thing is about anger and, you know, that kind of stuff. And you got people in their little folding chairs in the blow up tent, you know, with probably some shitty microphone, you know.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, those shows are always hell. Those are festival shows or shows where they have a bunch of different things going on simultaneously. There’s a band over there and there’s a comedy tent over here. I’ve done a few of those.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s horrible.
JOE ROGAN: They’re always hell, yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Different stages. So you got five bands and you can hear every one of them and you’re trying to, you know, be funny.
The Art of Comedy Performance
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s not a good environment for comedy. I mean, I’ve done a lot of different kinds of comedy. Like arenas, theaters, comedy clubs is really where it’s supposed to. Everybody agrees with that because I think what comedy is, is you’re performing, you’re doing, but you’re also hypnotizing people.
What you’re doing is you’re getting them to think the way you think. You’re putting people into your mindset. When I watch a comic that’s really good when they’re on stage, I let them think for me. I’m like, think for me. Take me on a trip. Take me on a trip to the way you think of things and you lock in with these and it’s much easier to do that.
It feels like as an audience member, it’s much easier to get locked in if there’s only 100 other people in the room with you or 200 other people in the room. But as soon as you get to 16,000, it starts getting weird. It starts getting. It’s a different thing now. It’s a show. It’s a big show.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: For sure.
JOE ROGAN: You’re not really. The only exception is the round. The round is weird because the stage is like this little circle and everyone’s around you and it’s oddly intimate. Even if there’s, even if I’ve done the round in Madison Square Garden. So there’s 16,000 people in there, but because they’re all looking at each other, everyone sees everybody’s face. It’s intimate.
Now it’s not a separation between the crowd and the performer who’s on the stage. Now we’re all in this together. It’s like a big hug. It’s very weird.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s an interesting point.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: We’ve played shows with a band like that in certain theaters where, of course, for a loud ass band like we are, sometimes we’re a little big for the room. But that’s an interesting point. Especially the thing about people being able to see each other, because then you don’t want to be the dick that everybody’s going, I wish that guy shut the f* up.
They’re right there because in the Coliseum, these cats in the back just hooting and hollering, not paying any attention. It’s a different thing. Can I pee?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s, we’ll pause right here. We’ll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I can throw this in a cup.
JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t matter. Unless you want to.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, I don’t care.
JOE ROGAN: No, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, Bud Light’s cool. They sponsor the UFC, so.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And we’re back. Where were we? What were we talking about?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, we were on comedy, and then I just talked about Lewis Black.
Fear, Bombing, and the Thrill of Killing
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We’re talking about fear. Fear of performing. And hypnosis. Yeah. About how it’s kind of hypnosis. So it’s a weird art form, but yeah, the bombing is horrible, but it’s also, the killing is the greatest feeling of all time. So it’s the only way you get one is with the possibility of the other.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: The only reason why you’re willing to go through the bombing is you know how great it feels when you’re not bombing.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: And killing is so great because you know that it doesn’t have to work out. It can be terrible. But it’s a weird art form and it’s a very new one. That’s the really, I think, in my opinion, real modern stand up, you could trace back to one guy. It’s Lenny Bruce.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Without him, I don’t think there is. I mean, it probably would have been invented eventually, but he’s the guy. Like, that’s, we have one person and we have film of him. It’s not like the first guy to pick up a guitar. Like, who’s that guy? Yeah, try finding him. Who invented the f*ing drums. Like, good luck.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Because they didn’t really. Like you said before him, that wasn’t. I mean, he made comedy performers stand up. Comedians, like rock stars. It was before that and all the controversy and all that kind of thing. Because before that it was variety shows. If you have Bob Hope and those guys, they’re always on some TV show and it was usually them and someone else. Yeah. Did you ever know Rodney Dangerfield?
Rodney Dangerfield in a Bathrobe
JOE ROGAN: Yes. I didn’t know him well, but I did meet him. And funny enough, I worked when I was 19, I worked as a security guard at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts. It’s this amphitheater in Massachusetts, and Rodney was performing there.
And it was at the stage of Rodney’s life where he only wore a bathrobe on stage, buck naked with slippers in a bathrobe. And I saw Rodney when I was working there. I was by the backstage area and I saw Rodney walking in the hallway, pacing with his f*ing bathrobe on. Like, this is the greatest thing of all time. This guy’s just going to go out there in a bathrobe. This was 1986.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Wow. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And so he went out there with his f*ing bathrobe and just murdered.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Murdered.
JOE ROGAN: I mean, murdered. The point where people were falling out of their chairs, dying, laughing. And I was like, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. This guy’s in a fing, you want to talk about not giving a f? He really didn’t give a f* anymore.
And there’s, I wish I had known him where I could have asked him, why the bathrobe? Like, what was it about that? But I’ve got to think that it was the ultimate not caring, the ultimate relaxing. When are you ever more relaxed than when you get out of the shower? He’s put on a f*ing bathrobe your dick swinging out there in the wind. And he just walked out in front of the whole crowd like that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: 15,000 people watching Rodney in a bathrobe just murder it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Nick Nolte used to do that.
JOE ROGAN: Did he really?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Nolte would do press junkets and interviews with his pajamas on and a robe. Did it for years. Yeah. And Nolte just was, yeah, I just want to be comfortable. Nolte had one of the greatest sayings for when somebody would come up to him who was a fan or whatever, and he was just messing with them. It wasn’t serious, but somebody would come and say, “Mr. Nolte, I don’t want to bother you.” And he’d go, “Too late.”
Meeting Nick Nolte at Fry’s Electronics
JOE ROGAN: I met Nick Nolte in the 90s because I was on a show called NewsRadio. And one of the stars of the show was Vicki Lewis. And Vicki Lewis was dating Nick Nolte at the time. So he was always hanging around. I knew Vicki and I got to know him. He was a really f*ing nice guy.
And one time I’m in Fry’s Electronics going to get a motherboard. That was back in the days where I would make my own computers. I would build my own computers and play video games on them. So great motherboards and really good video card and all that jazz.
And I see this dude with glasses on who’s going over this box and I go, “Hey, man, what’s up?” He goes, “Oh, hey, Joe.” And it was, to me, it’s the coolest thing in the world that Nick Nolte knew who I was outside of the set. Outside the set, it was normal. Inside the set, rather, it was normal. He’s there with Vicky. He says hi to everybody. But to meet him in an electronic store, I was like, this is the craziest thing of all time.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I’m 27 at the time. I’m like, this is just so nuts. I know Nick Nolte. This is f*ing insane.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s amazing. I knew Vicki too. Skinny, little red haired gal, crazy voice. Oh, right.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. Could she sing?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. Powerful voice.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
The Power of Music
JOE ROGAN: To a talent, wow, that’s, that to me is one of the most impressive things when someone could just sing their f*ing ass off. Because I can’t sing at all. So when I hear someone sing like that, I’m like, God, what can you do with your voice? That is insane.
The beauty of a good song is, man, it’s one of the most misunderstood things that we love. Because I think it’s an art form that creates a response in people that just, like a drug. Like if there’s a drug that you could take that made you feel like when “Midnight Rider” comes on the radio, and it’s just the right time to hear it.
Like, maybe you just had a shot, and your buddy tells you something, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, man, that was f*ing great.” And then all of a sudden, doodle, do, do, do, do.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. You know what I mean? It’s just.
JOE ROGAN: It’s like, oh, yeah. And everybody’s like, whoa.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a drug. It really is a drug. And some songs are made for the car, and then other songs are made for at home, just laying around. Like, especially back in my hippie days. It’s you weren’t going to listen to King Crimson or Pink Floyd in the car. You’d run off the road. But “Midnight Rider.” Oh, “Midnight Rider” is the car song.
JOE ROGAN: That is the car. That and “Radar Love.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah. “Radar Love.” That’s another one. I saw those cats live. Really golden earring. They opened for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: A Dutch band.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. That’s wild. That was a song I used to listen to when I go to visit my girlfriend. She was in western Massachusetts. It was an hour and a half drive. I listened to Radar. I loved.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: She was driving all night, man.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s one of those songs that makes you think you are the guy. Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: You’re the star of the song. Yeah, yeah. There’s songs like that, like “Shooting Star” by Bad Company. Everybody wants to be that guy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, everybody.
JOE ROGAN: You’re like, yeah, that’s me, man.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I’m going to be a superstar. Then I’m going to die young and everyone’s going to miss me. Yeah, right.
John Lennon and the Power of Art
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s like in the John Lennon documentary where that cat, that homeless hippie cat, comes up to his door, and he’s kind of starving and stuff. And he says, I don’t know if you ever saw it, but he’s obviously been living in the bushes, and he thinks that one of Lennon’s songs was about him. I think he probably had a little schizophrenia or something.
And Lennon answered the door and was talking to him. It’s in the documentary. And he says, “Well, when you’re singing that, I mean, it’s, I felt that, you’re singing about me.” And it’s such a, and Lennon just said, “No.” He goes, “I only write songs about me.” He said, “I don’t know about your life.” He goes, “All I write about is my experience with stuff. So it’s not about you.”
But he says, “Are you hungry?” And the guy goes, “Yeah.” Next thing you know, he invites them in and they eat and stuff like that at his house. But sometimes, some art form can influence people so much that they identify with it so much that it becomes that to them, especially people who have some mental issues or something like that can really speak to them. I mean, sometimes in a negative way.
I mean, once again, John Lennon, that cat, I mean, read “Catcher in the Rye.” “Catcher in the Rye,” he thought he was that cat in there.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, people are very malleable, and some people, mentally ill people, extremely. And something, one song, one book, one movie can. I mean, how many people went nuts after they watched “Taxi Driver?” Oh, yeah, I’d like to know that. Like, how many people thought they were Travis?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, for sure.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that was, that was a f*ing intense performance. De Niro in the early days. God damn, that guy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, he was great. Really great. And it’s funny how many comedies he does now, playing a dad or a grandpa.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Angry, grumpy, “Meet the Fockers.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah, that’s so funny. Duvall, my mentors were Duvall and Bruce Dern.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.
Working with Hollywood Legends
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And guys like that. And the fact that not only did I get to meet them, but work with them several times a piece. And once, you know everybody, you start to. Sometimes you hate to hear yourself talk, because I’ll be talking to some younger actor, you know, like 25 or 30, and they’ll say, oh, yeah, I really love that movie.
And so with, you know, with Robert Duvall, I go, yeah, well, he’s my mentor. He brought me up. And it’s like. And, yeah, look at. I watched some of the old movies, too, you know. Like, I always thought Lauren Bacall was so hot. Yeah. I knew Lauren Bacall. And it’s like. Then you start to sound like an asshole, but it’s just a fact. You do know him.
JOE ROGAN: But it’s a different reality, though.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It is a different reality. And you get used to it to the point where you just look at all of these legends who, you know, I mean, I knew Gregory Peck very well, Elizabeth Taylor, all of them, and Roddy McDowell, and I got so used to it that I would forget most of the time, you know, and then every now and then you go, I’m talking to f*ing Lauren Bacall, this Bogart’s wife. I mean, are you shitting me?
And so I still pinch myself sometimes. I mean, I’ve been really blessed to have met a lot of great heroes of mine, you know, and become friends with. Right now I’m working with Sam Elliott. Sam and I have known each other since probably late 80s somewhere in there. Worked together twice before, but there’s a couple of scenes at a time. Tombstone. And then 1883. But kept up with each other over the years.
And here’s another guy who was more of a mentor from a distance, I just always admired Sam, and now I work with him every day.
JOE ROGAN: That’s wild.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it’s amazing.
JOE ROGAN: It’s got to be weird, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s so wild that he’s such a sweet man, such a great actor. But when he and I do scenes together, it’s literally like you and I talking right now. It’s that natural just to. We essentially talk to each other off, you know, when they cut. It’s no different than the scene we just did. You know what I mean?
The Naturalness of Great Acting
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, that’s when he’s been doing it so long. He’s so good. It’s just he’s so relaxed that even though you know it’s Sam Elliott, you believe he’s whoever the f* he’s playing. Because there’s a naturalness to it. Like you were talking about with yourself. There’s a naturalness to it.
And that translates when people are watching a film or watching a television show with that. Which television shows aren’t even really television shows anymore. Like, I don’t think Landman’s a television show. It’s a long movie.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a ten hour movie.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s like, which is the beautiful thing about streaming, that’s really. When you got shows like Ozark and Stranger Things, and it really started with the Sopranos, where you’re doing, it’s essentially like a really long film. It’s not, I mean, it’s on television, but what does that mean anymore? F*ing everything’s on television. Most people watch movies on television.
Like, what does that mean anymore? It’s just a distribution device for whatever art you’re doing. And on those kind of shows, it’s so important for you to buy it. You know, it’s, you get this, you’ve got this character. It’s not just one guy in a film. Like, I’m not buying that guy. It was something. But he sounds like an actor, you know, versus 9, 10, 11 episodes in second season. Like, I got to believe that guy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I got to be sure. Yeah. And the naturalness is the thing, you know. There’s a great scene in Landman where you’re explaining, which I loved, you’re explaining windmills and what green energy and how much fing horseshit this all is for you to feel good about yourself. I fing love that scene, but I know you’re Billy Bob Thornton, but in that scene, you’re that fing dude who works for an oil company who’s like, shut the f up.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: What are you talking about?
JOE ROGAN: Do you know what the f* you’re even talking about? It’s because of that naturalness that that works.
The Viral Windmill Scene
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it was that. That scene was, I mean, it became huge. I mean, it was all over the Internet, that scene. And, I mean, when I run into an oil guy, wherever it is, I mean, you know, mainly Texas, but wherever I am, they always bring that scene up and thank me and, you know, thanks for showing people what this is.
And, you know, I do get questions, you know, obviously, because of the nature of the show. People try to politicize everything. And the fact of the matter is, is that Taylor, with that show is not taking a side. He’s just saying, here’s a look behind the curtain at how this works.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it’s about, how are the people who work in that industry, whether you’re on the suit side or you’re out there in the fields. And if you’re the family of, like, I have the family in the show. It’s just, this is how it works, and this is how it affects the people who work in it. This is how dangerous it is. Here’s how much of a gamble it is, and here are all the other crazy people circling your world. In my case, the family, you know.
And when I did that scene, I was committed to it, you know, because when I read it, and Taylor’s very good about writing gigantic monologues for me. And when something makes sense to you, dialogue wise, it’s easy to do a long monologue if you don’t know what it means. It’s harder to learn the dialogue if you understand what the person has written.
I’m not saying if you agree with or disagree with it, but if you understand what they’re saying, it’s actually easier to do a monologue than it is to do a back and forth scene with people. Sometimes I bone more lines on a back and forth conversation than I do when I’m just sitting there telling somebody something. Like Jerry Jones scene, you know, Jerry was telling his life story.
I mean, it wasn’t, Taylor wrote something there for him, you know, because he’d heard the story before from Jerry. But if it had been written and Taylor said, you got to write, you know, you got to say these words, Jerry probably wouldn’t have done it, been able to do it. But the fact that Taylor said, just tell that story you told me. Yeah, it’s his story. Yeah.
It’d be like, if I ask you, tell me your life story, you can do that. And if you get a person who’s not an actor to be themselves, they’re better than actors. You know, I’ve always found that I’ve cast people in movies that have never been in one before. I just don’t tell them we’re rolling and I really don’t.
Casting Non-Actors in Sling Blade
In Sling Blade, the guy Rick Dial, who played the guy that ran the fix it shop, kind of big guy, I went to school with him since the third grade. And I always thought this guy could be an actor, you know. And when we did the first scene with him there in his shop, when Jimmy Hampton brought me over there and said, this is Carl. He’s going to work here and all that stuff, I just went to Rick and I said, dude.
And Brent Briscoe, who played Scooter, the guy could never fix anything. And I said, look, Rick, the camera crew, they don’t have their shit together. I said, they’re going to have to get some marks and do a bunch of stuff. So this is not on us. So we’re going to run this scene, but we’re not really filming it. Just say the dialogue. If you f* something up, don’t worry about it. He was letter perfect.
Once we started saying action and shit, then all of a sudden it got a little different. Most stuff in Sling Blade was a first take.
JOE ROGAN: Because he’s relaxed. Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: The pressure of the moment. Action. Action is a crazy word.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I hate it. I don’t even, usually when I’m directing, I don’t direct much anymore. But when I do, I just kind of say, well, you know, you guys go whenever you’re ready, you know, but then you have ADs and PAs out there on their radios and shit, and they’re all screaming shit. And it’s like, don’t disrupt the flow here. Just let the cats do it, you know.
I mean, Clint Eastwood has been known to say, you know, jokingly, but instead of cut, sometimes an actor I know worked with Clint. And he said when Clint was satisfied with the scene, he just goes, okay, that’s enough of that shit, instead of cut.
The Origin Story of Sling Blade
JOE ROGAN: But what was the process of deciding to do Sling Blade? Like, how did, you know, you’re obviously trying to find a vehicle for yourself, and they’re not offering it to you, so you create it yourself. But what was the process? Like, how did you decide to do that guy? Like, what was it?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a story that nobody believes. I’ve told it a couple of times, and nobody believes it. And it’s the absolute truth. I was doing one scene. I think there were two scenes, but it was, one of them was cut out of the thing. It was, I think it was an HBO movie or something. It started Val Kilmer, and I was playing a railroad conductor in the 1920s.
It was based on an old movie with Paul Muni called I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Old movie from, I guess, the 30s. And they remade it and called it the man who Broke a Thousand Chains. I played a railroad conductor who had a wool f*ing thing on for the 20s. And they had the, you know, the whole 20s haircut with the sides pretty much shaved off, you know, and that kind of stuff.
And we were shooting in Riverside, California, at this old railroad museum. And an old director named Daniel Mann, who directed Tea House, the August Moon with Brando and some other movies, he’d come out of retirement to do this. He was an old cat. As a matter of fact, he was so old school that when I went to read for him, there was a casting director named Kathy Henderson who was always good to me. So she’d always get me in to see the director.
And he was sitting there behind the desk. He had a little gray goatee and glasses. And I just talked to him for a few minutes. And then I read a couple of lines with him. It’s just me and him. And he literally said, kid, I got a pot for you in this picture. And it was like, what am I? What is that, Louis Mayer? Who the f* was I just talking to? You know?
And so they put me in the thing. And this was in the 80s, and I’m burning up, you know, Riverside, California, it’s hotter than shit out there. It was in the summer. So I’m in a wool suit with a conductor hat on and just sweating my ass off. And I go in, and this was in the days when I was still in a honey wagon. So there’s just a little tiny room, you know, a little bathroom and a little couch just like that. Wide.
And at lunch I went in and I put the air conditioner on. I took that conductor hat off and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, you sorry son of a bitch, you’re never going to make it doing any of this shit. Music, movies, nothing. You’re just, you know, why are you out here? You know, to make, you know, three or four hundred bucks for a day. And Val Kilmer’s the big star and you’re just some idiot with a couple of lines, you know?
And I literally made that face in the mirror at myself.
JOE ROGAN: Wow.
The Birth of Sling Blade
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Made the face. And I started talking in that voice because I was so in a moment of self-loathing that I literally started going at myself in the mirror. I did that monologue to the girl, that’s the college student who comes to interview me in the beginning of the movie. It’s like a nine minute monologue.
I did that monologue in the mirror to myself right there and never wrote it down. And I can remember it to this day because I have all these weird afflictions. I have terrible anxiety and have obsessive compulsive disorder, really bad. And I grew up dyslexic and kind of an edge of the spectrum kind of guy.
And I always had the ability to remember stuff. I have a photographic memory. I’m dumb as a bag of hair in every other aspect of life, but I have a photographic memory. And even if it’s not something I read on a page, it’s up here. And so I remembered that monologue.
And then I realized that I was talking about certain things that were actually in my life. The idea of him living out back in this shed, just sleeping in a hole back there, and the family would bring him his food and stuff, like he was a creature and stuff like that. That was based on a guy in Alpine, Arkansas, that lived there.
The story was that his mother was scared by a snake when she was pregnant. Old Southern lore. Or the father was drunk when he was conceived, but actually he had polio and was what the real deal was. He walked funny, he talked funny and everything.
So Carl is largely based on a combination of this guy Ed in our town and Frankenstein. Frankenstein and the kid and sort of not knowing any better. Well, I was told by the parents in the Bible, it says, if you see some, like, sex is bad or whatever it was, he sees his mother with his cat Jesse Dixon, and he kills her. She told him to do that, so that’s where it all came from.
And I started doing it as part of a one man show in the theater back in the late 80s. And from that one man show, that whole character was born. And then I wrote a short film and we did that. And that’s why I got Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar was from that. It wasn’t, I mean, it was my original screenplay, but it was adapted from my own thing. And so that’s how that came about.
JOE ROGAN: So when you went to do a one man show, did you ever think that you want to make it into a film? Or was it just like, I want to put this on its legs and just whatever this idea I have in my head, I want to make something out of it?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: At that time, when I was doing it in the theater, I didn’t think much beyond that. A couple of years later, I started thinking about it and I thought, that’s the story. And I knew the story before I ever wrote it. I wrote it in nine days.
And my oldest son, Willie was actually on my lap most of the time while I was writing on paper, because I don’t know how to type. So I just wrote it on paper, like a tablet, like that. And eventually we made that little short.
And then these guys that made it short wanted to make it into a feature, but they had this whole other idea about it. They wanted to show what happened when I was a kid and show me murdering the mother. I said yes, the wrong thing to do. So I made it myself.
And I directed a documentary on Widespread Panic, the band out of Athens, Georgia, and Colonel Bruce Hampton. But that’s the only directing experience I’d had. And I didn’t know shit about it, but I knew the story.
And I got Barry Markowitz, my DP and got some guys and asked John Ritter, who I was working with at the time, you want to play a gay guy from St. Louis who moves to a little town in Millsburg? And he goes, yeah, I’ll do it.
None of us thought this thing was going to do what it did. I thought my mom and my brothers and people like that would see it, and that was it. And it became iconic.
JOE ROGAN: How weird was that?
Overnight Success
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Very weird. Very weird. Yeah. I mean, when they say overnight success, that literally was the moment. I mean, I had a name within the movie business from this movie called One False Move that we did in 90 or so, 89 or 90. So people were already, had made deals to write screenplays for various studios and stuff. And I was getting acting work here and there.
But when I did Sling Blade, it literally, I woke up one morning, I was not only a millionaire, but hugely popular. And it freaked me out. I mean, I appreciated every moment of it. But really when you’re going through those times, it’s such a blur, how quickly it happened and everything that, I mean, to this day, I think back on it. I think, how the hell did this, how the f* did I get here?
And I don’t think you could get that movie made now. I think a lot of movies that I’ve done, you couldn’t get them made. I don’t think there’s an audience that would either tolerate it or be interested in it because most of my writing is based on novelists and not screenwriters.
I’ve stayed out of Hollywood my whole career pretty much. Other than the high profile relationships, maybe other than that, I haven’t associated with Hollywood much. It was just, thinking back and going, how did I become a movie star?
JOE ROGAN: I think you could do it today. Because I don’t think anybody had ever done it when you did it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No, that’s true.
JOE ROGAN: You know what I mean?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s true. But I think because maybe, well, see, Sling Blade, first of all, it’s not a comedy. There’s funny stuff in it. But a lot of people come up to me and they say, man, that Carl, he’s funnier than shit. And it’s like, well, if you think about what it’s really about, it’s not that funny.
But I just think because of the climate, it’s like, well, is he making fun of a mentally challenged guy? Bad Santa? I mean, it’s like, you can’t be that crass anymore or whatever.
JOE ROGAN: I think you still can.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, I think if you do, people…
JOE ROGAN: Will go to see it. It’s just you’ll get a lot more pushback now because people think that they can and that they can stop things and cancel you and all that jazz. But the reality is, if it’s entertaining, if it resonates with people, they want to see it.
It’s just nobody wants a finance. That’s like, comedies have died. When was the last time there was a really good comedy movie? It’s hard to make because of all this pushback. All these people that freak out about things and if you don’t like it, don’t go see it. That’s my opinion, you don’t like rap music. You don’t like people talking about that. Don’t listen to it. You don’t like this, don’t go see it.
The Problem with Critics
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. That’s exactly what I believe. I actually think that critics maybe should only do reviews on things they like. I mean, because what…
JOE ROGAN: Good, right? What are you trying to do?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: What are you trying to do with the terrible review? So they claim that they’re trying to protect the public from this atrocity. And I don’t understand why they think that they are the savior of everybody’s 15 bucks or whatever that is.
Like, you know, I can’t believe I saw this movie. It wasted two hours of my life. I’ll never get back. It’s like, when people storm out of a theater, I stormed out of the theater. Because of a f*ing movie. I mean, seriously. I mean, just go in there and if you don’t dig it, you don’t dig it. Don’t worry about it.
Just tell the public, hey, I’m nobody, but I saw this movie recently. It was pretty f*ing good. You might want to go see it as opposed to this vile piece of shit. Blah, blah, blah. To have that type of arrogance to think that you are informing them that they should stay away from something. I don’t get that part.
JOE ROGAN: I mean, well, because you’re not gross.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a gross profession.
JOE ROGAN: I mean, do you remember when Siskel and Ebert were like the, if you didn’t get two thumbs up, you were f*ed.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: F*ed.
JOE ROGAN: Those two guys had so much goddamn power. And now we know they’re both twats, they both hated each other. You ever see the videos, the two guys just bitching out each other, talking about, don’t f this up. Like, you fed up the last one. Oh, you just fed that up. And like, these are the guys. You have the worst fing personalities. And you’re telling everybody what’s a good film, what’s not a good film.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Fortunately, they liked me.
JOE ROGAN: But there’s certain things that are undeniable. But it’s like that. One of the things I think is great today is audience score. Like, audience score of a film versus critic score. And they’re oftentimes completely lopsided.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yes.
JOE ROGAN: Like, I pay attention to audience score. Like, do people like that movie? If critics like the movie and people hate it, maybe they’re not getting it. Maybe it’s just esoteric. Maybe it’s weird. Maybe I’ll really like it then. But generally speaking, the critic score is not as interesting to me as was the audience score.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: That’s what it’s made for.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely. And that’s who I pay attention to.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I want the fans, I want the audience, because critics, like I said earlier, there are so many critics now that, I mean, critics to begin with are generally not, but no human is qualified to judge any piece of art. I mean, to start with, it’s like if you don’t like something or it doesn’t strike you, or you see some really silly shit that’s kind of not made well or whatever, that’s fine.
But how can you have a profession where individuals can tell everybody in the world what they should think about something is a bizarre world to me. And like you said earlier, like, with awards, it’s not like sports. How can you win an award that is an intangible thing?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, if you run 100 meter dash in the Olympics and you’re the first son of a bitch that breaks the tape, you won. How in the hell do you know if I won? You know what I mean?
Awards and Socially Conscious Films
JOE ROGAN: A movie. A movie versus that movie versus this. Oh, yeah, yeah. And God forbid you’re in a year where there’s some sort of socially conscious film that has to win. Like, if it doesn’t win, then who are these monsters that are voting? You didn’t vote for the socially conscious film. Like, how dare you?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And yeah, the socially conscious film and also the one with the music that tells you exactly what you’re supposed to feel every moment.
JOE ROGAN: Yes. You know, that’s the weirdest thing that we’ve all accepted about film, is that there’s music in scenes. That is a weird thing.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it is.
JOE ROGAN: It just happens and it’s normal because we’ve been around it our entire, you know, Darth Vader comes out. It’s always been like that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s like, here comes the shark. We see the f*ing shark, dude. It’s like the shark is about to eat Robert Shaw. Yeah, we’re scared already.
JOE ROGAN: There’s something eerie about a film that doesn’t have music. Now there is.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: This is.
JOE ROGAN: This seems too real.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, right.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Like, at least when there’s music playing in Psycho.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You know?
JOE ROGAN: You know, it makes it like a little less, a little more palatable.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
The Nature of Critics and Audience Connection
JOE ROGAN: The other issue with critics is that they don’t want to be critics. I don’t think anybody wants to criticize other people’s art. They just don’t have anything to contribute. Like, if they did, they would probably stop being critics and be novelists or be screenwriters or whatever it is.
So generally speaking, the people that gravitate towards that don’t have something to contribute to art. So they’re just professional haters. That’s why they love to write bad reviews. And they write the most vicious, “I’m going to destroy his career, the way he portrayed that role.” They just try to find the most biting way to dismiss you and shut you down.
But it’s the individual, like the type of human that’s doing that for a living. It’s not necessarily anybody you want to aspire to be.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, nobody’s. And that’s why, like you said, it’s the audience.
JOE ROGAN: Yes.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That’s who you’re doing this for. You’re not doing this for organizations or award shows or critics or whoever it is. You’re doing this for the audience. Those are the people that go pay a ticket price or sign up for Paramount Plus or whatever it is to watch these things, and that’s who you want to please.
I mean, I don’t particularly give a shit if the actor guys I’ve run across in my lifetime like my shit or not. I’m not really doing it for them unless you love movies, unless you love good work, then those cats are viable.
But I just don’t, I’m in a good place right now. My daughter Bella is going to Cal Poly up there, and she’s doing great. She’s 21 years old. My sons both have jobs in their own places and are doing well. I love my wife. I’m doing a show I love with a crew and a bunch of cats and actors that I love. I’m touring once or twice a year, making a couple albums a year. I just don’t let that shit bother me anymore.
JOE ROGAN: Good for you.
Award Shows and Industry Politics
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s like I honestly don’t give a f*. People say that sometimes as a reverse psychology kind of idea. It’s like, “Oh, I’m never going to win this.” Because I tell my wife every time I’m going to win an award or lose one, win or lose, because I know I’ve gotten used to it, and I can follow the trend.
And she’ll go, “Oh, my God, you’re going to get the Golden Globe or the Academy Award or whatever it is.” I go, “No, no, no. That guy right there is going to get it.” She goes, “How do you know?” I said, “Trust me, watch and see.”
I was nominated for a Golden Globe for the first season of Landman. We went over there, and I knew instantly it wasn’t going to happen because they had us, if you were in a stadium at a concert hall, and your seat was, here’s the stage, your seat’s right here, it’s going to take you 30 f*ing minutes to get to the stage.
We walked in there and saw our table. I said, “We’re sitting back here by like the staff. We’re sitting by the people bringing out the f*ing food.” I said, “It’s not going to happen.” And she said, “Who’s going to win then?” And I’d been telling her this, and she didn’t believe me. She goes, “You still believe that?” I said, “The guy from Shogun. I promise you that guy wins.”
I mouthed it to her as it was happening. I couldn’t pronounce his name, but I said the Japanese guy from Shogun. Literally said it. When they have panels of each one of you when they announce it, because they want to see the other guys.
You know what I want to see one day? I want to see somebody like, let’s say the three of us are nominated for something. And it shows you, and it shows me, and it shows you, and you’re trying to act nonchalant, like you don’t give a f. One day I want to see somebody just go, “F.” In one of those things. That would be awesome.
JOE ROGAN: I’ve only been to the Emmys once, and it was when Phil Hartman died and he was nominated. So we all, as a cast, went. And I’ll never forget this, because he didn’t win. And Dave Foley looks over at me and he goes, “What the f* does he have to do to win?”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right, exactly.
JOE ROGAN: It was so funny in the moment. The guy just got, beloved guy got murdered. This big, giant, horrible thing. His wife killed herself afterwards. And we’re all sitting there, and he just looks at me and goes, “What does the guy have to do to win?”
I’m out forever. I don’t want to come back. Leave me alone. Keep me out of this chaos. And the worst thing you could ever do is get sucked into it and then play to that and then do stuff specifically to try to win awards. Like, ew. What have you become?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I know.
JOE ROGAN: They got you.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, they got you.
JOE ROGAN: And they can get you. They can get any of us. Just like crack. Crack can get anybody. All you have to do is smoke it a few times. It’ll get you.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, for sure.
The Overnight Success of Sling Blade
JOE ROGAN: The thing, I think it’s kind of crazy with you because you’re one of the most legitimate overnight successes ever. Like, a lot of people were overnight successes, but it was kind of like a slow drip and then something kicked and, oh, wow, now it’s something big.
But man, Sling Blade came out and all of a sudden you were all over the f*ing news. It was like everywhere. And that’s the wildest ride that anybody can be on because also, this is the ride before the Internet. So there were not nearly as many famous people.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Sure.
JOE ROGAN: That’s the thing. If you think about a movie star back then was so different than a famous person today.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: Because there’s TikTok celebrities and reality TV celebrities, and it’s just, there’s so many famous people. It’s like an unprecedented number of people clamoring for attention.
So to be a Billy Bob Thornton when Sling Blade came out was a crazy spot in life because there’s only like 20 you motherf*ers out there.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: There’s like 20 famous actors. Like maybe 50 that you could get people to name. And you’re one of the 50. Like, holy shit.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Back then, if you’re number 18 on the top 20 list of actors, you’re pretty far down the f*ing row, right?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy, right, if you think about it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Because being famous then was a very different thing than being famous now.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It was. It was very famous. I mean, now people are famous because they’re socialites, they go to parties and stuff.
JOE ROGAN: Or they’re the Kardashians, famous for being famous. And no one can explain it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: But it’s like that bizarre world. There’s no class you can take to navigate that. No one can help you. No one’s going to, no one can tell you like what to do, what not to do. First of all, it’s a new thing. Like, literally new.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: By the time Sling Blade, what year did Sling Blade come out?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Made it in ’95. Came out in ’96.
The Evolution of Film Stardom
JOE ROGAN: So films are much less than a hundred years old. So films are really like real films where people know who the actor is. Who’s the first film star? Buster Keaton is silent. Then you got Charlie Chaplin, right? It’s real f*ing recent, man. It’s real recent in the zeitgeist of the world.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And then you’re one of them. And knowing what the f* is this?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it’s unbelievable. I mean, when I would work on sets early on with people that I grew up watching, I’m just like, wow, I’m standing next to Andy Griffith or whoever it was, Robert Redford.
And now you start to realize that you’re in a group, in an age group of actors who are looked at by 20 year olds or 30 year olds like I looked at those guys because they say this stuff to me. “I’ve been watching you since I was a little kid,” and all this kind of stuff. And it’s an odd feeling.
The only thing is, and maybe I’m off base here, but I think because, and once again, social media has a lot to do with it, I believe, I don’t think that because of our younger generations’ lack of history, their knowledge, how far history goes back to them.
I don’t think a hundred years from now, generations will look at us the way we looked at Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March and all these different people, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, whoever it was. I don’t think it’s as important. Goes back to the too much access, too much exposure.
And I just don’t believe that in the history books 30 years from now, let’s say they’ll look at me or Quaid or Costner or whoever it is as the Bogarts and the Tracys that we revere only because society’s changed so much.
JOE ROGAN: But is that a bad thing? Because they still, like people love you and they still love Costner and they still love Quaid and they still love all these people. It’s just, you know them more that they’re human beings now.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right? Yeah. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a different thing.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s a different thing.
JOE ROGAN: It’s a different thing. A movie star back then, like Clint Eastwood in his prime, that’s a different thing. Like you never saw that guy outside. It wasn’t like he was doing YouTube videos and sitting down talking to people.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, I think the difference is with Eastwood or any of those guys, Duvall or, but you’d be surprised how many people if I named Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman, how many people I talked to who don’t know who they are.
JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.
The Loss of Historical Knowledge
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I worked with a 35-year-old costumer and I said we were doing a photo shoot at the time. We had four guys who made the records who were in the band. And I said, “Hey, there’s four of us here doing the photo shoot. Which one of us would be Ringo?” And this girl, she’s 35 years old and this is not that long ago, 10, 12 years ago. And I said “Ringo?” She goes, “What’s that?” I said “The Beatles.” She goes, “Oh, I’ve heard of the Beatles.” And I’m like, yeah, it’s like hearing of George Washington, you know.
And I said, “Can you name any of the Beatles?” And she goes, “No, but weren’t they like some kind of…” And I said they were a band who started every fing thing we do nowadays. And I couldn’t believe it. And she was like a hip girl with like orange hair and fing nose rings and cheek rings and everything else.
But it just seems to me that people’s history is, it’s kind of, it’s become different. Like our history. When I was listening to whoever, Cream or Jimi Hendrix or Traffic or whatever, I still knew who Billie Holiday and Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman were. Now a lot of people think Ozzy Osbourne is just a guy on a reality show. It’s like, no, he was in a band called Black Sabbath way back in the late 60s.
And I think history is important for us. I think if you don’t know where shit comes from, I think it’s part of what you put into your art or your influences and also to see what they went through to get where they were. I just think it’s important, I mean, with anybody. Politicians. How many people know that Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin? Oh, he’s the guy who flew a kite and discovered how to make electricity come to some other place or whatever.
But they were fighting over states when there weren’t that many states. And it’s like, well, wait a minute, we’re in New York, we got way more people than you do in Virginia or whatever it was. And so we get more representatives than senators than they do, they only get one or whatever. Well, Benjamin Franklin comes in, who’s one of my heroes, he made sense about shit. He comes in and he says, “Tell you what, how about you have more state representatives than they do because you got more people in your state. But how about in terms of the Senate, everybody gets two and then you get more representatives.” And they’re all like, “Okay, makes sense.” I mean, those are the kind of guys I like.
The Problem with TikTok Brain
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, history is important, but I think one of the problems with people today is like, there’s so much information coming at you that everybody has TikTok brain and young people in particular. It’s very difficult for them to get a sense of history when they’re being inundated by very short attention span content all day long. They’re just getting fed nonsense.
So it’s hard for them to actually read something or sit down and have the attention to get into something and really get fascinated by, watch a good documentary on somebody or read a book on somebody. They’re just checking their phone all the time. They’re always checking their goddamn phone. They’re addicted to this f*ing thing.
And growing up that way, like you and I grew up without it, so you get to see it and how it’s affecting the way people view the world. And it’s not good. It’s not good. It’s certainly not good for creating future versions of Ringo Starrs and John Lennons because it’s like, what do you have to say if you don’t have any understanding of what’s going on and what’s ever gone on?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And it’s addictive, like you said earlier, because I put these things down and yet I’ve got the fing thing with me all the time. And if I get out in the middle of the desert in California someplace and don’t know where the f I am, I’m like trying to call home and shit. But I mean, I lived most of my life without that and having to see if you had any f*ing change left because you had to call somebody to payphone.
We had a thing in LA called the Thomas Guide. You had the Thomas Guide where you had to look up shit. All of LA County, San Bernardino County, all of it was in there. It’s a book, big old book. And you had to look on these maps, which are confusing and shit. And if you took a GPS away now from people, nobody would ever get to work on time. Nobody would find the f*ing place they’re supposed to have a meeting.
Because you also can’t stop at a gas station anymore. I mean, remember when you didn’t know where the f* you were and you’d stop over at the gas station and you’d go, “Yeah, I’m trying to get to 1625 Wilson Street. You know where that is? It’s supposed to be by like the sawmill.” Some guy would go, “Yeah, okay, yeah. What you’re going to want to do…”
JOE ROGAN: People take pride in being able to give you directions, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It was a big thing, like a guy who could give you directions to a place. That’s a cool guy.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: I’m going to tell you how to get there.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: This is what you got. You get on the 405, you’re going to get on exit 16, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. They knew that shit.
Life Before GPS and Smartphones
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, now, I mean, I know LA inside and out. I could be a cab driver there, or I should say Uber driver now, I guess. But one way or the other, if you’re someplace else, I mean, I use it too. It’s like, but if you took GPS away, it would run people batshit crazy.
JOE ROGAN: Yep. Yeah. And if you took away the ability to just press someone’s name on your phone to call them, if you had to remember their number. Oh, yeah, we had to remember numbers.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I still remember numbers from my hometown. I mean, I still, to this day, I rarely, in other words, I can take my phone and I can type in the people that I call on a regular basis. I can type in their numbers. I know their numbers. But it is true that if like, my wife, she’ll say, “Well, I don’t have so and so in my contacts or whatever,” somebody we know really well. I’m like, learn the damn number.
I told our daughter, I said, “Look, when you’re at college, you need to have my number in your head all the time and your mother’s.” Know the numbers. Especially if you get arrested. For sure, you got one call, dude.
JOE ROGAN: Nobody knows how to do that anymore.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I know.
JOE ROGAN: Who am I going to call when I have f*ing no idea? I know like three people’s numbers. Yeah, it’s like being an overweight person that’s addicted to food because you have to eat to stay alive. So you’re going to have to do some of the thing you’re addicted to no matter what.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right.
JOE ROGAN: It’s not like gambling. You’re a gambling addict. Stay out of the casino, you’re going to be okay. You know what I mean? But like, if you had to still go to the casino every day and gamble a little bit, but you’re a gambling addict, that’s a crazy f*ing problem to have. And that’s a problem that every young person has with their phone. They’re all addicted to their phone.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They’re completely addicted.
JOE ROGAN: And you know, all of us too. I’m addicted to my phone. And you’re using it every day because you have to get places, you have to call people, you have to text, you have to check your email. So it’s always there. And you just have to develop some sort of a relationship with it that’s not crazy.
The Spectrum of Internet Addiction
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, that’s true. And people, it goes from mild addiction to severe addiction to Internet creating this environment where people actually kill themselves.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, it’s that big a spectrum. And people talk about getting canceled all the time on this stuff. And it’s like, how about if you don’t give a shit? I’m not on social media, I don’t deal with it. I mean, the band has an Instagram, but I don’t run it. They put pictures of me taking the garbage out. That’s what people want to see. They don’t want to see your picture on stage. They want to see that you’re just this regular dude with your ass crack showing, taking the garbage down the hill, the normal shit.
JOE ROGAN: Chicken fried steak.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They love that normal shit. Yeah, that’s true.
JOE ROGAN: Well, they want to know that you’re f*ing normal. Like everybody.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, I’m sub-normal.
JOE ROGAN: But there’s also the problem where people are putting up stuff to make themselves look cool. Like everybody’s trying to look cool online.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: It’s just, what a weird thing to try to do all the time.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And they got Liquify. That’s one thing where you can make yourself skinny.
The Dangers of Social Media Filters
JOE ROGAN: Oh boy, that’s a problem. Yeah, that’s a problem too, with a lot of young ladies because they see that and then they think that that’s attainable and then what’s wrong with me? I look normal. And you realize like, well, she looks normal too. She’s got some crazy f*ing program turning her into this bizarre form of human that doesn’t exist in the wild.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Jonathan Haidt wrote about that. Where you see in the beginning of social media, you see almost instantly a giant amount of young ladies that experience self-harm, cutting, depression, suicidal ideation, actual suicide. It all ramps up at the same time that social media does, because you’re comparing yourself to someone’s life that’s a very distorted version of reality.
Distorted like rose-colored glasses, propaganda version of reality that this person wants you to know how cool they are. Look at me, I’m with a girl in a bikini and I’m sitting on a Ferrari. The stack of hundreds full. How am I not that guy? I’m just a loser. I should jump in front of a f*ing train.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And there’s a face, when you’re feeding a baby, there’s something, I guess it’s from our, it’s in our DNA or something. But you feed a baby and you go, you open your mouth and they say that that probably came from, you’re showing the baby what to do, right?
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: But somebody yawns, you yawn, right? And you feed the baby like this. There’s a thing with these selfies that people take on the Internet that they can’t not go…
JOE ROGAN: You know what I mean?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s that face. It’s very bizarre.
JOE ROGAN: I did a bit about that in my act about imagine seeing a photo from like the early 1900s where a girl’s like this. She’s a f*ing time traveler.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: This is so strange.
JOE ROGAN: Like the invention of the selfie.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Exactly.
The Selfie Generation
JOE ROGAN: My daughters are on Snapchat and they snap each, they snap all their friends. So this is how they communicate. They rarely text, they just make Snapchats and they just have like in front of the camera and then they take a picture and like, “Oh, my God. So bored.” Whatever it is. This is how they’re communicating with each other through selfies. It is very weird.
The Impact of Fragmented Attention
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. Everything is in snippets. And the fact that if you have a TV service that has 1800 channels and I find myself doing it, I sit at home, I got it on the Cincinnati, Pittsburgh game. Watch a few minutes, and it’s like, okay, here, you know, it’s first down there on their 18, you know, flip it over to the Chargers game, you know what I mean? And just go back and forth.
And I grew up with three fing channels, you know? And so you had to watch everything all the way through. And I’m convinced that that’s the reason that trivia is easier for people that grew up with very little, because you remember every fing bit of it. Right now you’ve only got like, a few seconds on each thing, and it’s like. I mean, now it’s like you’re watching. Even if it’s your team, something else happens. Did somebody text you to start doing that?
Next thing you know, like, you know, I’m a Colts fan, you know, doing this, everything. Next thing you know, oh, the game was. Oh, yeah, that’s right. They were only three and a half minutes. I didn’t see the end of the game, or I changed it over to, you know, Rawhide on the old Guy channel or whatever for a few minutes.
JOE ROGAN: I was thinking about that once, about podcasts, that podcasts are one of the only times where I’m never distracted by anything but the conversation. And I think it’s one of the reasons why I like it so much. And the same thing is when I do commentary for the UFC, I’m talking about the fight. So I can’t be looking at my phone. I’m not answering texts. I’m not checking emails. I’m not looking at TikTok. I’m just locked in on what is happening for six hours.
And so those, if you could find a thing where you can have a break, escape from the clutches of all the information that’s in the rest of the world, coming at you, all the f*ing bad news and all the guns and tits and everything that’s coming at you from all over the world. Yeah, it’s very beneficial. It’s brain.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And I love the fact that your show has.
JOE ROGAN: It’s.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You sit for a few hours.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, when do you get a chance to do this? I mean, and that’s, you know, I came late to podcasts, but I remember doing, God, I can’t remember who. I did Norm MacDonald’s podcast, and I did one other guy did his podcast, and then those are the first ones I did Kevin Pollak. I did Kevin’s. I didn’t even know what it meant at the time. And since then, I’ve done a few, but I like them, too. It’s literally, like, the only place you are where the interviewer doesn’t check their f*ing phone.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, I literally, I do interviews with people who, while I’m answering what they just asked me, they text somebody back or look at it for a second, and it’s like, hang on a second. It’s like, how important is this to you? That it’s more important to let Mitzi know that you’d rather have spaghetti tonight, you know? F*ing hell.
The Importance of Presence in Conversation
JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, you’re completely breaking whatever bond that you have in the conversation. It’s not, it’s two people exchanging information, talking to each other, and you have to look at each other in the eye. You got a field with this person. It’s a dance. And if you stop in the middle of the dance, like if you were on a date with someone, you’re telling them some crazy story and it’s really important to you, and they’re just like, yeah, wow.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, that’s good for your ego. Right?
JOE ROGAN: There’s no sense in continuing any further with this relationship.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Right. You know, it’s like, honey, were you serious when you said you loved me more than anyone?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Hold on.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. What were you saying? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I love you more than anybody I ever loved.
JOE ROGAN: I just barely love anybody.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, right.
JOE ROGAN: And I’m kind of mildly interested in everybody. And that’s sort of what’s happening, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I know.
JOE ROGAN: We’re mildly interested in everybody and we love almost nobody.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s weird. That is weird.
Navigating the New Digital Age
JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird time. But the only way we’re going to get through it that, where that makes any sense is you got to say things like that. We have to figure out how to navigate it. It’s new. Just like I was saying that when you were a movie star, the first time you became a movie star through Sling Blade, that’s a new experience, just period in human civilization. Becoming a movie star is very recent. Yeah, it’s hard.
And this is this thing of everything being online, this thing of everybody having access to all this f*ing information coming at you, all this media, all this, all these opinions and all this stuff to watch and car accidents and animal attacks. And this is new. This is a completely, so almost like the shit that you had to go through when you became famous through Sling Blade.
The whole world’s got to go through this new type of thing with phones and with social media and with the Internet in general, and we’re not ready for it. We don’t know what, we don’t know how to do it yet. And people are giving classes on how to manage it, and there’s apps that can limit your time on certain things. You can cut yourself off. We don’t know what we’re doing. This is f*ing new as shit. And just like fame, a lot of people are going to get wrecked by it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yes, totally.
The Dangers of Early Fame
JOE ROGAN: It’s a completely alien way of being, like, a person that becomes, especially, I was friends with Ricky Schroder, known Ricky for like 25, 30 years. And there is no way anybody becomes famous at like 6 and makes it out okay. Right. It’s not possible. Right. Like the way I liken it to making cement. But you don’t put enough water in like you. So it’s always going to be f*ed. Sure, there’s a part that’s never a nor. You had a normal life and then, or semi normal, whatever. Whatever. Normal.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It wasn’t normal. But I wasn’t a movie star.
JOE ROGAN: You weren’t famous and then became famous. But if you’re famous from the time you’re a f*ing baby and your whole life you’re in the public eye growing up, that’s insane.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It is insane.
JOE ROGAN: Whether it’s Miley Cyrus or, you know, you look at poor Britney Spears losing her f*ing marbles, what do you expect? Nobody gets through that.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Okay, what happened to those, remember the kids that did that show? Was it Different Strokes and like a couple of them?
JOE ROGAN: Yep.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Like one girl, she, you know, robbed a liquor store or something and then became a dope and hooker and then, you know, dies young. And one of the guys on there also, you know, I think he got on drugs and then eventually died. Some of them kill themselves.
I’m really happy that my success in terms of being famous anyway came at a later age. I actually really relish that I did not become famous when I was 19 or 16 or whatever it was. Because at that point, with my state of mind in those days and just doing everything I wanted, you know, I would have been dead by now.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: There’s no doubt about it. I would have never made it to 30.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and if you did, you’d have so much regret.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: What did I do?
JOE ROGAN: What the f* did I do? Why did I do that? Oh, yeah, because you lost your mind because you’re famous at 8 years old.
The Value of Hard Work Before Fame
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. If you’ve, you know, it’s kind of an old guy thing to say, but, you know, everything I got, I earned it. And I’m glad I did. You know, I’m glad I didn’t have a hell of a lot of help along the way, that I just persevered and did this stuff. But I think that knowing what work is before you get famous really helps you out in your life.
I mean, you know, I worked at a sawmill, a machine shop. I hauled heavy equipment, hauled hay when I was 13. I did all that shit. And I mean, stuff that looking back on it, it’s like I don’t even know how I did it half the time. I went and worked as a carpenter’s helper. And so if I hadn’t done all that stuff, if all I had known was the entertainment business, I think that would drive any f*ing body crazy, you know, I don’t think I would have made it through that if, you know, like, looking at the real world out there from a place where you never experienced the real world.
JOE ROGAN: Right, right.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Like you’re talking about Ricky and all that stuff. It’s like if your only experience has been people getting your fing juice box for you, you know, or whatever it is, then, and you get used to that shit, too. I’m telling you, these days, my wife thinks I, I’m the most helpless son of a b* in the world. And in some ways, I am.
I mean, I get into an airport and I used to go to fing airports before I was famous. I knew where to go. I knew where to put my shit, you know? Now I’ll go in there and I look like I’m, it’s like Logan’s Run. I look, you know, I get out and I’m looking like, where the f are we now? You know? And I’ll ask, you know, my assistant or publicist or somebody. I’m like, like, well, can I take this bag on there? Or is this one. Where’s the thing we go through? Do I need to do this? Do I need to do that? You know? And it’s like, I know f*ing well what I have to do.
JOE ROGAN: But you’re used to people doing things for you.
The Psychology of Aging
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You get used to it. Yeah, I mean, you get used to somebody driving you someplace. I’m a driver. I grew up. I raced f*ing cars. I’m a muscle car guy now. We go someplace, I ask my wife to drive. It’s like, well, you know, maybe it’s because I’m old. Maybe because when I walk up and down stairs now, it’s a psychological thing.
Physically, I’m very fit. I mean, I can do shit, whatever I want to. If I got to run in a scene or whatever, I’m fine. Something psychological happens to you when you get, like 68 or 69. And Tom Mayhew, our tour manager for the band, he and I were talking about it. We were talking about how now when we get in the shower, you know, like we’re in a hotel and you get in a shower, you grab the f*ing handicap rail and you go really slow.
I don’t have to, but I do, because something up here tells me, here’s my age. Now. If I fall, I’ll be dead in six weeks because I’ll break my hip. And then I’ll get pneumonia and I’m done. And I’m like, I don’t, I feel 19. But for some reason, going downstairs now, I don’t just hop down the stairs anymore. I take it one stare at a time.
You know, it’s not real, and it’s not real that I don’t know how to get around a fing airport. None of that shit’s real. And yet something happened to me where I think now I’m just this helpless fing old man who, you know, is going to have to have my caretaker f*ing, you know, get me to the gig, you know, and then I go on stage, I’m just like, you know, it’s like, wait a minute.
You know, walking up the steps to the stage, I’m just like, you know, and I get up there and fing go out to the edge of the stage and slap hands and shit. If I fell off that fing thing, it’d kill me instantly. But I do it. So none of that shit’s real. It’s weird, right?
Defying Age: The Rolling Stones Example
JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s weird when people defy it, right? No, like, I saw the Rolling Stones when they came to Austin a couple years ago at Coda. So it’s like 100,000 people or something out there. It was nuts. And I swear to God, it was like an out of body experience because you can’t believe you’re actually seeing Mick Jagger, right? You’re like, that’s him. That’s really him. He’s really up there. But he’s f*ing, he’s a thousand years old.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, buzzing your lip, baby.
JOE ROGAN: He’s dancing and moving around. He’s got two fing trailers. Two trailers that he brings with them everywhere he goes. It’s just workout equipment. Yeah. That motherfer gets after it every day.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They say, absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: He’s like, this is the only way. If you don’t do that, it’ll fall apart and then you got nothing for sure. But he’s out there like he’s 30 years old. Oh, yeah, it’s nuts. It’s really amazing to watch.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I mean, like I said, we just open for the Who.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And Roger and Pete are, they’re 80, 81, whatever. Crazy, and they’re the f*ing Who still up there singing their ass off, playing their ass off.
JOE ROGAN: That’s another new thing. Like when we were kids, there was no old rock stars.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: No, they all died. Most of them were dead by 29, right?
JOE ROGAN: 27.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: 27 was the year.
JOE ROGAN: Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, they all died at like 27.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Wow. Kurt Cobain. They all died young. So when we were kids, there was no touring bands that were like 70 years old out there on the road killing it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And we’re more popular than we’ve ever been, and so it’s all bullshit.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s all in your head.
Age Is Just a Number
BILLY BOB THORNTON: It’s all in your head. But not only were there not rock stars when we were growing up that were even many over 40, right? Aside from the ones who died. Age has changed a little bit. I mean, if you look at my dad’s high school yearbook, these motherf*ers, when they were 17, they looked like they were 55.
JOE ROGAN: Hard living. Yeah.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Like a man in those days. My dad died at 44 years of age. I thought he was an old man. And when I think of 44 now, it’s like, are you shitting me? That’s like babies. But 50 and 60 and 70 meant something different when I was growing up.
Now 70 is kind of like, a guy like Sam or Duvall, they look at me and I’m still like a kid to them and shit. That’s crazy. And 70 year olds, I think it’s a lot of it is, I eat real healthy.
And I actually had a holistic doctor tell me that because I’m allergic to a lot of shit. It’s not like I got something against eating cows. I’d love to, but I have type AB negative blood, means you don’t have many digestive enzymes. And so I just get fing indigestion and get all fed up and bloated.
I just grew up because I ate everything growing up. I mean, shit. In Arkansas, Texas. And I just grew up thinking that when you eat, you feel like shit. I just thought that’s the way it was. This thing’s overrated. F*. I feel like hell. But now I eat really healthy and I eat fish and turkey and vegetables and fruit and beans and rice and stuff.
JOE ROGAN: So it’s a red meat issue with you?
Diet and Health Philosophy
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah. I can’t have beef or pork. I can have turkey and fish. They digest easier. But I think people are, and especially if you’re in the entertainment business, you kind of keep a younger mind and also eating healthy.
But this holistic doctor I was talking about, I was talking about the, and this is really unpopular to say, but not my words. I was actually told this, and I was saying, look, I don’t smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I smoke probably three quarters of a pack. Unless we’re on the road and I’m on the bus with the guys. I smoke like an old Buick.
Sometimes I drink light beer. I don’t drink hard alcohol and stuff like this. And this holistic doctor said stress is one of the worst things in the world for you. If smoking a few cigarettes a day that don’t have chemicals in them and you’re drinking light beer, which, like I said in Landman, has less alcohol than f*ing orange juice.
You have a few of those a day and have a few smokes, and if that alleviates your stress, especially me being high anxiety. He says, probably healthier for you to just keep doing that.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they say that’s one of the worst things ever. Rising cortisol, stress, anxiety. It wears on your nerves, your nervous system. And then loneliness. They say loneliness is worse than smoking for your overall health. If you smoked a pack and a half a day, you’d be way better off just doing that than being lonely.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Look, how many spouses die a few months after their husband or wife died?
JOE ROGAN: My grandfather. That’s what happened when his wife died, when my grandmother died, he died within a year, he was gone. He was fine before that, he was actually her caretaker. He was taking care of her. And then when she’s gone, he was dead in the air.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Happens all the time.
JOE ROGAN: Died of grief.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That old saying, you could die for a broken heart.
JOE ROGAN: I believe that’s real. That’s real sadness. And also, it’s like, why am I still here? She’s gone. I’m 90. Like, what is this? What are we doing here? Let’s call it a quit, call it a show. Listen, man, we just did three hours.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: So cool.
JOE ROGAN: That was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you. Thank you for doing this.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I hope I didn’t f* anything up.
JOE ROGAN: No, it was great, man. It was great. It was awesome. I love your show. I love everything you’ve done, man. So it was a pleasure.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here.
JOE ROGAN: Thank you very much. All right, bye, everybody.
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