Top

Billy Bob Thornton

February 16, 2012 by · Comments Off on Billy Bob Thornton 

Billy Bob Thornton, Here are some things Billy Bob Thornton would like you to know about him: He’s a pretty normal guy who mostly hangs around his house in Los Angeles with his 18-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. He doesn’t go to a lot of parties. He likes movies, music and baseball.

He knows you’ve heard different. “Supposedly, I’m a vampire and I wear vials of blood around my neck, which was all not true. Not true,” he says. Those were the rumours when he was married to Angelina Jolie, and people said they carried each other’s blood on necklaces. He did have a locket with a smear of her blood on it, “but the way they talked about it in the press (made it sound like) I wore a quart Mason jar around my neck, you know what I mean?”

Maybe you heard he’s afraid of antique furniture. This is also an exaggeration, although it is true that he doesn’t much like hotel rooms with old carved chairs and velvet cushions. “That stuff kind of creeps me out,” he says, but not for any spiritual reasons. “I just prefer a clean, modern table to eat my gravy off of. Not some dusty old s—. And that’s really all it is.”

There was also a rumour that he only ate orange food. “I have no idea where that came from. I probably went into some place one day and ordered only oranges because that’s all I wanted that day, and the next thing you know, the waiter said, ‘He only ordered oranges.'”

Still, if Thornton were a bit eccentric, you couldn’t blame him. When he was growing up in Arkansas, he had a distant father, “a very strange guy, very morbid, but I learned later he didn’t have the emotional capacity to really talk to his kids.” He wouldn’t let Billy Bob take piano lessons because he thought only “sissies” played piano (“I guess he only thought about Liberace or something”) and from the time Billy Bob was as young as four, he would take him to look at car accidents on the road.

That grisly hobby has been transferred to Thornton’s new movie, Jayne Mansfield’s Car, a family drama in which he plays one of three grown sons of an angry war veteran named Jim Caldwell during anti-Vietnam protests of the late 1960s. Jim, played by Robert Duvall, is based on Thornton’s father, and he drives down the back roads of Alabama with his grandson to view wrecks and bodies.

Bottom