Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t do soapboxes. At least, not the political kind. Appearing at the ATX TV Festival to talk about Landman, his new oil-rig drama on Paramount+, the 68-year-old actor was asked – again – about the show’s political implications. His response, like the man himself, was dry, slightly mischievous, and mostly noncommittal.
“You know Andy, I don’t talk about politics publicly,” Thornton said with a grin, eliciting a knowing laugh from the crowd. Then came the punchline: “I think we need a party called the Common Sense Party.” That got whoops and cheers.
Thornton walks a careful line in this regard, offering just enough frustration with today’s political division to sound folksy and reasonable, while avoiding anything that might stick to a campaign ad. And that’s Thornton’s entire vibe. He’s not apolitical, he’s just wary of being pinned down.
Oil industry politics and Landman morals
He talked about being in New York a few weeks earlier. During a press event for the series, a woman asked Thornton: “How do you justify the morality of a show like this?”
He saw it coming.
“I grew up playing music,” Thornton told the ATX crowd. “So I can always see the guy who’s the musician who hates us. I saw this lady in the front row, and I could tell she was the one.”
But he didn’t back away from the question. Instead, he reframed it: “Taylor [Sheridan] has written a show that doesn’t have an agenda, it shows you what happens. So this is just a peek behind the curtain of an industry that a lot of people don’t know anything about. And he’s not saying ‘yay oil’ or ‘boo oil’ – he’s saying here’s how it works.”
So while he may be on the fence… would you vote for him if he ran the Common Sense Party?
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