Billy Bob Thornton remembers vividly the night that Tommy Norris, the straight-talking, ice-water-veined, hands-dirtied oil industry fixer at the center of the Taylor Sheridan-created Paramount+ series “Landman,” came into his life.
“Taylor and I had dinner after the premiere of ‘1883,’ which I’d done a cameo in, and he said, ‘I’m writing this series. I’m going to write it in your voice,’” Thornton tells Variety. “He told me what it was about, who the character was, and I pretty much said yes before I ever saw a script.”
Thornton’s instinctive response proved to be a shrewd one. “He really did capture the voice, so for me it was just a matter of putting on a white snap-button Western shirt and a cowboy hat,” the actor laughs. “I mean, I can’t take a lot of credit for it. Taylor did an amazing job, and I fit into it like a glove. You’re supposed to say all your processes and all the complicated things you did, because people think there’s a trick to everything. But honestly, the part was written for me and when I read it, I said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s me. I can do this.’
Thornton quickly recognized aspects of other roles he’s played mingled within Tommy’s DNA. “Tommy’s very similar to some characters that I’ve done. I would say it’s only the world in which he operates that’s different,” he says. “The solitary part of Tommy is very similar to the character I played in ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’; I think he has his ‘Bad Santa’ moments; and if Tommy Norris were a lawyer, he would’ve been kind of like Billy McBride in ‘Goliath.’
And unlike some actors who are perhaps overeager to “disappear” into various roles, Thornton welcomes such overlaps in the parts he plays, allowing aspects of his own persona to shine through. “I think your best work is when you play yourself to a degree, because it’s going to be the most honest thing you do,” he says
Ali Larter’s road to the role of Angela, Tommy’s outrageously saucy ex-wife, with whom things are newly rekindled, was decidedly different: After a move away from Hollywood with her family and pandemic-induced career interruptions, she was eager to stake her claim on the juicy role.
“When this came along, it was a really tough casting process and I fought for it and I wanted it,” she explains. “I’ve never played someone as free as her, someone who’s so comfortable in her body and in all of her antics and everything that she does to get what she wants. She is a bit of a pistol!”
Winning the role – and doing some of the most acclaimed work of her career – didn’t come easily for Larter, who found herself digging deep to capture Angela’s blend of over-the-top, hilarious highs and moving, vulnerable lows. Exploring the role’s emotional depths and her vivacious physicality has been, she says, “exhilarating and exhausting.”
“So much of her is that she loves the shock value, and she’s someone who came from nothing and has come into this massive life, and so more is more for her. She really doesn’t have that off button,” Larter explains. “It was really hard to be able to harness that energy for her, because she’s this emotional roller coaster and we’ll go from laughing to crying.
“I sit in a room alone when I’m on set – I’m not out there with everyone,” she reveals. “I really have to conserve my energy and stay very calm, so that I’m able to kind of bring her into all of her glory and to be able to deliver the vision that Taylor had for her in the show.”
That glory is built on the intense balance of friction and passion that fuels reality-rooted Tommy and impulse-indulgent Angela’s fiery romance. “If you held onto what was on the page, it was a caustic relationship. It was kind of nasty and vulgar,” recalls Larter. “Billy and I worked a lot together to figure out how we wanted to portray these characters.” She and Thornton lobbied to balance the head-butting with softer nuances and lively humor to “keep it incredibly grounded and real, and from a place of beauty and that first true love that you never let go of.
One of the things Ali and I did discuss and brought to that relationship is we’re always at each other, but you’ve got to see that they actually love each other,” explains Thornton. “We made sure if there’s a scene where she’s like, ‘I hate you!’ ‘Well, I hate you!’ – whatever it is, at the end of the scene when I put the hat on and go to work, I say, ‘I love you, baby. I’ll see you after work.’ You get that this is just a thing they do. And honestly, I think it kind of charges their sexual relationship – it’s the fight before the good stuff!”
Larter agrees, adding, “They can be brutal to each other, but at the end of the night there’s still that wink, that kiss, that hug. There is a deep sense of security and the love that they feel for each other that gives them a freedom to be who they are as people.”
Their tumultuous dynamic is further heightened by their attempts to mend and maintain their oft-fractious dynamics with their children, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) and Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who bring their own dramas to the dinner table, literally. “The family cracks me up,” says Thornton, who takes a clear-eyed view of how Tommy can deal so coolly and matter-of-factly with deadly drug dealers threatening to upend his company’s oil operations while constantly being thrown off balance by his own brood.
“To put it very simply, he doesn’t have to go to bed with the drug dealers at night,” Thornton chuckles. “At least when Tommy goes in with a hammer to take care of a guy, if he doesn’t get killed and he gets rid of the other guy, the day’s work is done. At home, it’s never done.”
The star adds, “Those two sides of it are maybe one of the reasons that people have connected to this show.”
“Landman,” which originally debuted on Paramount+ in November 2024, ranked No. 8 on the top 10 chart for all SVOD originals for Q4 2024, according to streaming data. The show also had the most watched global premiere and finale of any series in the history of Paramount+, according to the network. The success of Season 1 and acclaim from critics and audiences helped Thornton nab award nominations for best actor in a drama series.
“To be able to be a team with Billy has raised the bar for me,” Larter shares. “We are not just working on our scenes; we really talk about the show as a whole. We put in a tremendous amount of work the first season to make sure it was grounded, make sure it had these moments. Working with him and making sure that we kept the work up to the level that we both could be proud of, has been really exciting.”
Thornton and Larter both praise Sheridan, who penned every script and co-created with Christian Wallace, for creating the world of the West Texas oil fields, highlighting themes of ambition and working-class struggles, and touching on unsexy subjects like mineral rights and the looming threat of climate change.
“Taylor’s shows for the most part have been pretty much heavy dramas or action things,” Thornton reflects. “I think the audience is really connected with this because there is the humor; there is this whacked-out family circling around me all the time while I’m dealing with this really heavy stuff. And so it gives people a chance to sit back for a minute and take a breath.”
“Taylor, honestly, took so many tones in the show that my fear was that they wouldn’t all come together,” Larter shares. “And it somehow worked seamlessly… I can play this character that can bring you laughter and can give you these moments of exhilaration and fun, and then also drop into these raw vulnerable moments. I feel so lucky to get to have that range in this role.”
From Tommy’s no-BS monologues about everything from the existential crises of the energy industry to his squeamishness about his teenage daughter’s sex life, and from Angela’s community service antics bringing seniors to a strip club to disastrous dinner party meltdowns angst-ing over her fractured family, “Landman” emerged as a sensation among viewers around the world.
“All I can figure out is that people want to see subjects they’ve never seen before, and they also want to see people who just say whatever the hell they want to,” Thornton postulates. “Sometimes it’s freeing when, in a world where it’s hard to just kind of be human sometimes, to watch these people just unabashedly just do whatever the hell they feel like.”
Larter recalls when she started to “hear and feel” the responses to the show, she was completely blown away. “Billy and the story of the everyman connected with an audience in a way that things haven’t [for] a very long time,” she says. “His work is so amazing that it draws you into our show.”
In March, fans were elated to learn about the show’s Season 2 renewal.
“This coming season, I think it’s a little more character based because the first season you have to explain everything to everybody,” Thornton teases. “This season, everybody knows this family, and everybody knows the situation I’m in, so we’re able to really let it breathe this year and get into these personal relationships a lot more, which I think is really wonderful.”
