‘Landman’s Billy Bob Thornton & Sam Elliott On Their ‘1883’ Kinship & Why Unresolved Father-Son Themes Of Taylor Sheridan’s Second Season Resonate So Strongly For Them: Q&A

EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Sheridan struck an immediate vein in Landman‘s first season, and he is trying to raise the stakes with several important additions in the show’s second season that began Sunday on Paramount+. First was getting his 1883 star Sam Elliott to join the oil-drilling drama as the estranged father of Billy Bob Thornton‘s Tommy Norris. That makes three tangled and complex generations of Norris men — Jacob Lofland’s Cooper Norris is the other — and it is clear that Sheridan’s going deep this time into fathers and sons.

It is a theme that reverberated with both Thornton and Elliott, I was to discover. The only regret from here is that readers don’t get to listen to the lyrical voices these two great actors and longtime pals brought to the table when we met at the Plaza Hotel late last week.

DEADLINE: Wildcatting is very different than ranching, but after watching the first few episodes of the new season of Landman, I think it feels like a natural successor to Yellowstone. Taylor Sheridan set the table in Season 1, and you are off and running in the first two episodes of the new season. You brought in Andy Garcia at season’s end and now you got Sam Elliott.

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Listen, if that’s how it affected you in the midst of all of what you do, that’s a really good sign. The audience is there. I’ve been talking about that for days. It’s wonderful, but on the same level, to me it’s astounding. It’s worldwide.

DEADLINE: Sheridan continues to write these episodes himself. He’s made an NBCUniversal deal that doesn’t start until 2029 and stands to make him a billion dollars if he comes up with 20 series, beyond the ones he’s still on the hook for like this one at Paramount. He quit acting cold turkey because he could see himself descending on the call sheet. You are an Oscar-winning writer, Billy Bob, with Sling Blade. Is there a comp for what Sheridan is doing?

THORNTON: I don’t know. I heard there was a point where he was living in his car as well. One of his close friends told me that. I don’t know that there is any explanation for it. Maybe the business just needed it at the time that he came along. Maybe the audience needed it as well. Taylor he’s just a gifted writer. And I think Taylor’s a very complex man. That is reflected in his shows, particularly this one. To be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of Yellowstone. It was like Dallas, to me.

SAM ELLIOTT: That said, 1883 was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been handed. Know what I mean? Taylor’s a gifted man. He’s got a lot of really talented people around him.

DEADLINE: He does an inordinate amount of the writing by himself.  

THORNTON: How much is a question that none of us are going to ever be privy to, but I know that he goes away and he goes and isolates himself and it pours out. In big chunks.

DEADLINE: Didn’t Sling Blade pour out of you pretty quickly?

THORNTON: Very fast. Yeah. The difference is, since I was writing movies as opposed to television, I didn’t have any deadlines to make, really, especially on Sling Blade. I had to sell Sling Blade. I mean, I just wrote it and then tried to get somebody to make it. I wrote it in nine days.

The similarity between me and Taylor is, we’re guys who don’t like time on our hands. Mine is because of my anxiety issues; if I sit too long alone, I start freaking out. So I got to be busy all the time, doing something. It could just be being with my family, hanging out with my kids, but I got to be doing something. I’m not a vacationer, I’m not the type that wants to go to the Bahamas and sit in a f*cking chair on the beach. I can’t do it. And that’s when I write songs, if I am in that situation.

Otherwise, I’m the opposite of Taylor. I think Taylor’s mind works faster than he can even write. Sam and I both know that Taylor cannot sit still. He’s not the guy that sits around with you and has three or four hours of conversation. He’s always doing something else. He’ll cast on his phone, while he’s talking to you. He’ll literally be looking at day players coming in, and you’ll be saying stuff to him and he’ll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. And just keep going. He’s like a moving machine. I’m that way in my head, but not physically. He is like, go to the rodeo, go get some honorary doctorate at a f*cking university. Then he comes home, has to go see his rodeo buddies. Then he goes and does a cutting event [with his show horses], and then he writes a script before he goes to bed.

I was never like that. I’m the kind of writer who will sit around for months without writing a damn word of the screenplay. I’m real lazy about getting started. Once I get started, I write it instantly. I think a lot of that is, I mull it over. It’s like I just sit and think, not about specific things like, oh, I’m going to do this scene and that scene, but just thinking about life. And all of a sudden, it comes. I don’t even write with something in mind, exactly. I know what it’s about. I know the theme. I know what I’m about to say, how I’m going to say it. When I sit down to write, I let the characters tell me. So let’s say I’m writing scenes about Sam here. Sam says this and says that, and then I’ll respond to whatever the hell I’d respond with. That’s the way I write. My characters take me through. I don’t pay much attention to act one, act two, act three. I just start. Taylor’s a lot like that too. Only he does five shows at the same time. I can’t imagine doing that.

ELLIOTT: No, I can’t either, not in a billion years. I mean, I get focused on one thing, and that’s all I’m thinking about.

THORNTON: Taylor’s over here writing a damn show action show with Lioness, with all that intrigue and sh*t, while he’s writing our show. And then while he’s writing 1923 or Mayor of Kingstown. It’s like you got four very different types of shows that you’re jumping back and forth between. I don’t have any explanation for it, and I don’t think anybody does. But he has told me before, he says sometimes when he starts writing, he has no f*cking idea where he is going, which makes sense to me as a writer. I don’t think you ought to know.

ELLIOTT: I don’t either. I’m not a writer, per se. Katharine [Ross, Sam’s wife and the Oscar-nominated star of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Graduate and many other films] and I adapted a Louis L’Amour book, Conagher, and that’s as close as I’ve ever been to a writer.

DEADLINE: Just hearing you talk, I don’t think you should have to write because what screenwriter would not relish their words projected by that voice…

ELLIOTT: I do have other people can do it.

THORNTON: Sam was just talking about he and Katharine adapted a book. See, to me, that’s hard. That would be harder for me, to adapt a book into a script, than to write an original thing. That terrifies me to try to adapt something. Especially if a book is long enough and has enough in it to where you don’t know what to leave in, what to live out.

ELLIOTT: Louis L’Amour’s pocket books are 80 some pages. That’s not too bad.

DEADLINE: So it’s not like a detailed structure?

ELLIOTT: No, it’s more a suggestion. I’ll tell you what it was with Louis. It was more about the dialogue. It just happened kind of by accident. He was doing another show and Louis passed away, TNT reached out to his wife about getting some rights to Louis’ books and she said, no, we’re not going to deal with that right now. But there’s one book that’s out there, and Sam owns the rights to it. So Imagine called me and we had a writer-director who I’d worked with on another Louis L’Amour project, a guy named Bob Totten, who had been around forever and did a show called The Red Pony. He came in and threw our script out and rewrote it. I read the script and talked to Ron Howard, and it probably ended my relationship with him. I just said, this is not Louis’ book, and we’re not going to do it with you. We’re taking it to HBO. Katharine and I knew Louis well. I stuck my neck out and did not endear myself to Ron Howard. I always regretted that part of it. I enjoyed writing in school and did a lot of it there, but just never in the business. Never had the confidence. Or the discipline.   

DEADLINE: Back to Landman. When you guys worked together years ago on Tombstone, how much did you find yourself looking at Billy Bob and saying, someday he’s going to play my son?

ELLIOTT: [Laughs]. I never thought that, but I always wanted to work with him. We’d crossed paths a few times, before Tombstone. The reason we got to know each other a little bit on Tombstone was through a mutual friend, Bill Paxton.

DEADLINE: You played Virgil Earp and he was your brother Morgan.

ELLIOTT: Bill and I were riding back and forth to work every day. Then when Billy came to town, he rode with us. They just finished working, prior to Tombstone. I got a glimpse of him, on the set, in that encounter he had with Kurt [Russell] and then one with [Val] Kilmer.  

DEADLINE: For the purposes of Landman, I looked it up and you are father and son and IMDb Pro says you’re 11 years apart. They do start early, in Texas.

THORNTON: It’s funny, people have brought that up, but if you look through movie history, there have been people who have played fathers or mothers or whatever who are actually younger than the other person. I mean, seriously, I believe the whole point of this is, we’re actors. You should be able to play anything. And so we’re not making a stretch here really. It’s 11 years in our real lives, but all you got to do [in your imagination] is add seven years. So they’re calling me in the show, I think I’m 60 or 62 or whatever, and they’re calling him 82. I don’t think anybody would not believe that, if there was no internet and they didn’t know or actual technical ages. They wouldn’t question it. They wouldn’t question it. It’s just like when I put a record out, not so much now because we’re pretty established, but early on.  

DEADLINE: What happened?

THORNTON: I first got well known in the movie business, but I’d been playing music my whole life. I was a damn roadie for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and everybody else. That’s how I came up, as a musician who went to L.A. to play music. Well, [some journalists] came in with an angle. Oh, he’s an actor wanting to be a musician. I think that if you are a multifaceted person, people start to not like that. In the old days, it was normal to be a Renaissance man, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. They danced, they sang, they rode horses, they did movies, and it was a natural thing to do. Now, it’s different, but they don’t say it about painters who become sculptors. They accept that. I think there’s some kind of this weird jealousy about it.

It’s like a rock star is the ultimate thing, and now, he wants to be a rock star. It’s like, no, no, no. I always wanted to be a rock star. I didn’t know I was going to be an actor. But if you were to put out 10 albums or songs, let’s say, and you played them for an audience of the shittiest f*cking critics on Earth, I mean just mean sons of bitches, and you played those 10 songs for ’em but didn’t say who they were by, my song might be a third out of the top 10 list. Might be first might be ninth, but it would be judged based on the merit of the song as opposed to them knowing who did it. Elton John could make a sh*t song and I could make a great song, but they’re going to love Elton John’s song and hate mine and go, he’s a f*cking actor. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I mean, I understand that. They don’t judge people by the art itself. They judge them by who we are, what our reputation is. If one of us said something sh*tty in public last week, all of a sudden they wouldn’t like us in Landman.

DEADLINE: Sam, I recall you didn’t want to do yet another job that involved you wearing a cowboy hat, but 1883 was such an epic you couldn’t say no. You’ve been selective, doing A Star is Born, but mostly enjoying life. How did Taylor reel you in?

ELLIOTT: It goes back to before Andy Garcia was involved. I didn’t work, after 1883. I hadn’t done anything. Is that by choice? Yeah, sure. I mean, I got offers to do stuff, and they’re not always great offers. They’re easy to turn down. But I got offered stuff that my agents would like to have seen me do. I had a number of physical things I was dealing with, some of them directly because of my experience on 1883, and some I had before that reared back up on me after shooting. That show beat the sh*t out of me. I had a fall. I’ve got two torn tendons in my hip that are aren’t going to heal up. I can’t hear anything anymore, because of all the f*cking gunfire. We were using these full loads, all the way through the show. I’ve been around that sh*t all my life.

DEADLINE: So what made you come back?

ELLIOTT: Billy Bob, and another chance. I talked to Taylor, and he asked me what I’ve been doing. I said, nothing, man. I just, nothing being home and enjoying it, being with my family, being with my girls and having a good time. And dealing with all this other [physical] stuff. And he said, well, I’m going to put your ass back to work.

DEADLINE: And then the actor in you kicks in? What’d you say?

ELLIOTT: I said, great. I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then he finally reached out to my agent and they started working on this deal, but I still haven’t seen any material. I’m one of those guys, I got to see it. I got to see something. I kept asking Taylor about it, even knowing that he’s turned out great material. He finally sent me the first couple of episodes. The were the two scenes you watched, me sitting there looking at the sun, and just talking. Then it was, when do we start?

DEADLINE: You lit up 1883 all the way through, but your pal here, he made the most in that tiny role of Marshal Jim Courtright, which started his relationship with Taylor that led to this. Was that scene as electric as it played?

ELLIOTT: We shot that in one night. Everybody wondered because that Marshal was a real character and we were all excited that Billy Bob was coming to town to play him. We started out with that walk down the street, and into his office and played that scene. But then when he came in and he shot up that f*cking saloon? We were all there, guns a ready. When he f*cking started going around [that room], he wasn’t looking at anything else but what he was doing. And the rest of us, we were just all leaning against the bar and ready to pull a gun. And he started walking around that room, calling all these guys out, not giving them a chance to pull a gun. One after another. And then that speech that he has at the end. Oh yeah. “There’s only one killer in Fort Worth. And that’s me. That’s me.”

DEADLINE: It was one of those make-the-most-out-of-the-moment scenes you remember, like Eddie Murphy in the bar in 48 Hours. Seize the moment?  

ELLIOTT: It was an acting class for all of us there.

DEADLINE: Is that true what your character says about his insistence on watching the Texas sunset every day because it’s the best in the world because of the dust and dryness?  

ELLIOTT: Yeah, I believe that is true. Taylor writes the truth and I was like, boy, I never thought about that. No one else would. And the way he frames it, that the place hates us all day, and then gives us this. You’d have to have lived there to know that.

DEADLINE: I would have thought you were a Texan. I was surprised to discover you were a California kid…

ELLIOTT: My family was all from Texas. Three generations, going back to the 1800s. I had a great, great grandfather that was a surgeon at the Battle of San Jacinto. Another was a Texas Ranger that got shot in the head after he came out of a bar in Giddings, Texas in like 1903. So why in the f*ck did I gravitate toward Westerns? I dunno. My folks moved to California. My dad worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service. They were living in Marfa, Texas. The day after or the evening after my mom graduated from the University of Texas, they moved out in the middle of f*cking nowhere. My dad was in predator and rodent control. That was the guy who killed cats, coyotes, a few bears and some wolves that were left. Hated amongst the environmentalists. My dad never let me forget I was not born in Texas; he called me a prune picker until he f*cking died at 54. So I had one of those relationships that never got fully resolved. I love my dad dearly, spent a lot of time with him growing up, but he wasn’t one of those guys who’d say, I love you, son.

THORNTON: We talked about that a bit. And when your dad was 54, you thought he was an old man, didn’t you?  

ELLIOTT: I did.

THORNTON: Mine was 44 when he died. I thought he was an old man when he died. 44 now seems to be like a teenager. 

DEADLINE: Billy Bob, your character’s son Cooper [Jacob Lofland] sets out to pull oil out of discarded wells. That whole process looks so dangerous. Did you ever have a job as dangerous as that?  

ELLIOTT: No. I have affinity for hard work, but I never had a job like that. I worked as a day laborer when I first came to L.A. There’s a wing behind the Beverly Hilton that stands alone. I was there. We built that in a summer and a winter on that job. That was interesting.

DEADLINE: Billy Bob, you had jobs like that, beyond being a rock and roll roadie?  

THORNTON: My first job, I was 13 and I hauled hay. I was hauling hay for a man named Charles Keeney who had the little corner grocery store in the neighborhood. I went in the mornings there and remember when you used to stamp the cans with prices? I went in the morning and I stocked shelves and stamped the cans. I didn’t have a Social Security number and they paid me cash. My dad knew the guy in the afternoons. I went out to his farm and hauled hay, at 13.

DEADLINE: What values does that hard work instill?

THORNTON: It’s why I don’t have a lot of tolerance sometimes, for people who call me, call us, entitled? Celebrities. I say, you know what? Back in history, learn who the f*ck somebody is. Before you start saying that, my first job out of high school was working at a machine shop, running a drill press. I worked at a sawmill. I worked at a storm door factory. I hauled heavy equipment, bulldozers and backhoes from Houston to Little Rock. Nothing but physical labor jobs. And in the meantime, I’m a skinny, long-haired little hippie, but I had to work. And at the machine shop, I made a dollar five an hour. That’s around $8 and 50 cents a day. That sounds like sh*t you read about in the ’30s. And people now will say, yeah, but back then a dollar five is really $3. So I made $24 a day. Who gives a sh*t? It wasn’t much money. I didn’t know how to do anything other than physical labor and throw a baseball and play music. I knew I was either going to be stuck in my town the rest of my life working somewhere, or I was going to have to pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals or be in a rock and roll band.

DEADLINE: That’s a wide net…

THORNTON: I had no aspirations to be anything other than an entertainer of some kind or an athlete. I wasn’t interested in anything else. I grew up with anxiety, dyslexia, OCD and all that stuff, and I didn’t have the mind for business. It wasn’t worth a sh*t at science or math or anything like that. So it was either, I get out of here, or I end up working at the hardware store or something. I took a gamble and went to California … I actually went to New York first, in ’77, and got my ass kicked. I went to live with my aunt and uncle in San Diego first. I was terrified of L.A. and I kind of snuck in. To go back around, if you’re a critic or a writer and you know what you’re doing, find out about someone’s history and criticize the art and not the artist.

It’s like once you become a well-known artist, all of a sudden if you have an opinion, you’re a f*cking asshole. Or you join the crowd and you’re one of them. If you go against the popular narrative, then all of a sudden you’re some kind of prick. Sometimes it seems like when you become an artist, you stop being a human being. They don’t look at you as a human being anymore. They look at you as a commodity, as somebody who owes the public, the journalists, the critics. We owe them to be exactly what the f*ck they want us to be. And we cease being somebody who can have their own mind and have an opinion. And if you say something, I could tell you right now, I grew up as a guy, and I’m making this up, but I’m just giving you an example. I could say I grew up just loving puppies. I took care of all the neighborhood puppies, and then now I’ve got a dog rescue and I’m just a dog lover. And then I could say one time, my grandpa’s dog was a pain in the ass and I kicked him in the ass, right off the porch. The only thing they hear would be that. And the only thing that lasts forever, like they didn’t hear all the rest of the good sh*t, is I kicked the dog in the ass one time.

DEADLINE: Well, back to this great start to Landman. Sam coming back with Billy Bob after 1883, LaMonica Garrett from that series to Lioness, Isabel May coming back from that show to narrate 1923 and probably another series in the works, and James Jordan being in virtually everything Taylor Sheridan does or will ever do. What’s it like to be in the Taylor Sheridan repertory company?

THORNTON: I’ll tell you, Mike, John Ford. Every son of a bitch he ever knew and liked was in every one of his movies. He had this troupe of actors, Ken Curtis, Ben Johnson. Maybe not every movie, but for the most part, he had a troupe of actors that went with him. As opposed to Hitchcock, who had the same woman in every movie, but it wasn’t the same person. Hitchcock had a thing for beautiful blonde women, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh. And he is in love with every one of ’em. He had a type, but some of those guys in those early days, they used the same people over and over.

DEADLINE: Makes it easier because you develop a short-hand?  

ELLIOTT: Yeah, there’s a short-hand, and he brings you in knowing what you do. I did a whole miniseries with Taylor, and we were together for a year. You know what he wants when you read it on the page. He knows you can give it to him. I worked with some of those John Ford guys on The Sacketts, the ones still alive by then.

DEADLINE: Had Taylor Sheridan not come calling with an invite to play a great character, would you have retired?  

ELLIOTT: I never thought I was going to retire, but I have enough to keep me busy if I chose to. And for the first time in my life, I think because of the physical issues, that I’ve thought maybe it’s time to just be grateful for the career I’ve had call it quits. But the odd thing about this part is, there’s a lack of physicality right now that works for the character. I can do that. I mean, I’m not rolling around in a wheelchair, but I’m f*cking off balance all the time because my hip’s f*cked up.

DEADLINE: What can viewers get excited about, this season of Landman?  

THORNTON: It informed me as an actor, being in the first season as the father. Now it’s the father and the son, the son and the father. That’s a hell of a dynamic right there. And that makes you start thinking, because he’s been out of my life for a while, and then he comes back into it. That’s going to make you think about your own son. Taylor set that up brilliantly. I didn’t even know in the first season there’s ever going to be a father. And then all of a sudden, not only is it a father, it’s this guy. Taylor has some kind of weird Spider-Man sense about how things can trigger actors. And it’s like, you son of a bitch, you just gave me everything. I need to think about this kid. I need to think about, about my past. And it gets heavy, too.

ELLIOTT: When I come in, I’m pretty well f*cked up. Not just physically, but mentally. And a lot of it is self-imposed. You can tell he’s been chewed up and spat out. He never got over the fact that he lost his wife, even though she didn’t die until the first episode. But the fact that she turned inward, that her spirit broke earlier, and she never came out of it. My character, I spent my entire life waiting for her to come up for air, and because of that, my relationship with him [points at Billy Bob] sucked.

THORNTON: And we will have our hard moments of healing. It’s incredible how Taylor writes the truth, and it’s complex. Also, he writes for Sam, and he writes for me. He’s not just writing a bunch of sh*t that he’s making up, and then you can slot anybody into the f*cking part. And so here’s one of the things that I didn’t even think about in the beginning. I was wondering why am I so moved this season? Because I am. And I realized what it was. They say the old thing about life imitating art and all that kind of stuff. First scene we have, he’s sitting out in a wheelchair. This is a guy I’ve known and loved for a long time. When I walk out there, I didn’t just see the guy in the scene. I saw Sam and I was me. I see Sam sitting in that wheelchair. Both of those things crossed each other and affected me. I see Sam out there, and I know he’s got a little problem with the muscle back here and everything. It’s nothing like people want to make a big deal out of it, but I know what it is. I got sh*t too. My f*cking neck’s so bad that if I turn this way, it feels like spiderwebs go down my arm. If I turn this way, and people don’t even know this on the set and on this side, it does that. I got a bad neck, I got arthritis, and I can watch myself on screen and my head is forward like Peyton Manning. I, and so it’s just a fact of life. We’re getting older.

I’ve loved this man since before I ever met him. If I’m in a scene and I see Sam, remember that scene where you go over to see the neighbor girl? You go over the fence. Well, Sam had to bend over and get a key, and he was a little stove up that day, and he bends over to get a key. I tell him where to get the key to get into the house, but he walks over and sees this girl at a fence, and I see Sam kind of limping a little bit over there. So when I am watching this, I’m not just seeing T.L. [his character] in the show. I’m seeing my friend limping over to the fence. All that sh*t’s real. There’s not a thing about it that’s not real. You start to think about mortality. I’ve thought about mine a lot because I’m a hypochondriac, anxiety disorder, f*cked up guy. So we’ve watched each other grow older. So all that thought, all those thoughts go through your head while you’re doing this. You’re playing a character, but there’s us in there thinking about the same sh*t, if that makes any sense. It makes total sense to us.

DEADLINE: Last lunch we had, Billy Bob, you said you didn’t have great memories of your own father. You said Taylor speaks through you guys. Was your unresolved issues with your father something you talked about, and he realized you would connect strongly with?

THORNTON: No doubt about it. Taylor did know about my relationship with my father because on the first season, he and I sat out there on the back porch and had a glass of wine. We talked about life a little bit, and I did tell him about my relationship with my father. Here’s the thing about it. My dad, like I told him, died at 44. He had what they call mesothelioma. Now you see the commercials, the PSAs. He was in the Navy. He was a fireman on a destroyer in the Korean War. Well, that’s a recipe for mesothelioma because it’s all asbestos. Not only is he on a destroyer, he’s a fireman on a destroyer. Well, he beat the dog sh*t out of me all my life. There were two things I did with him where it was like me and my dad.

He thought I was a pussy because I didn’t play football through the 10th, I went through the 10th grade playing football and figured out that a strong safety can’t weigh 140 pounds. I went to baseball. I wasn’t good enough for him. But there were two things. He didn’t like music. I never met anybody in my lifetime who didn’t like music in general. He had two favorite songs, and here comes the dichotomy. He liked “Easter Parade,” that song from one of them f*cking Fred Astaire movies, something like that. And he liked “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I don’t know why. He was a tough ass basketball coach. Little short ass Irishman. And so he’d beat me with a belt and we just never had any kind of relationship. He and I would go and my brothers would go lay on the trunk of the car. We had a carport, and we’d watch storms. He loved them. And to this day, I love storms. We’d lay there and watch lightning. There’d be a tornado coming, and my dad would have us laying on the back of trunk of the car, just watch things develop in the air, and the smell and everything. The other thing that we did every year: the blue herons would migrate through there, and there was a marsh out there by our town, and these blue herons were everywhere. He always took us out to see the blue herons. To this day, I love blue herons and I love f*cking storms. So it’s like, how can you say you didn’t want your dad, that you didn’t need his approval, that you didn’t love him? I remember those things. I mean, the beatings were like … they were what they were, but back then everybody did it. All of my friends’ dads beat the sh*t out of them too. We just thought that’s what dads did.

I broke the cycle. My kids are embarrassed at how affectionate I am. I go the opposite way. I’ll put my arm around Bella or Willie or Harry, and they’re like, dad, stop doing that. We’re in public. It’s like, don’t be so damn affectionate. I was at college the other day with Bella, and she was going to go in and get a hot chocolate in the library, where they got a café. There you go. [Sam thrusts a photo he just took of a blue heron before us]. Is that a blue heron? There you go.

ELLIOTT: Here’s a wet one that was in our yard. Sorry about that Billy.  

DEADLINE: Did you ever play those two favorite songs for your father?

THORNTON: Oh, no. No. He just liked it. I don’t know where it came from. But the whole point is that when my dad had his funeral … That’s an odd statement, when my dad had his funeral.

ELLIOTT: Well, he did have it…

THORNTON: And his best friend was buried next to him, who was in the Army. So there was an Army and a Navy grave right next to each other. I went to his funeral and I was 17, and his buddy, Charles Keeney, that owned a store where I stamped the cans and who I hauled hay for, he came up to me. I’d never seen a grown man cry. I mean really weeping. He came up to me, and he hugged me, streaming tears. And this is the guy that beat the dog sh*t out of me who just died. And I wasn’t crying. And I was his son. He hugged me and he said, you have to be the man now.

Now you can go one way or the other with that. Here’s where I went: from 18 to 24. I became a drug addict. It was too much. When he said, you have to be the man … now, I had two younger brothers and my mom, and I instantly became a drug addict. Really? I stopped drugs at 24 years of age. I’ve never done ’em since. But when I got in my 30s, I was living in Glendale and with a friend of mine had a blow up mattress back in a spare room. I was sitting back there in this little old tiny bedroom that I was living with my buddy who was in my acting class, and I started thinking about my dad. Tears just came. I just cried like a baby because in that moment I realized why it happened. Not only did his daddy beat the sh*t out of him and his daddy before him, my dad wanted to be more than what he was. And he saw a sensitive kid that he had, who wanted to be a musician and that people liked and stuff. And he resented that. I was the first male grandson in the family, and all the women doted over me. And he was stuck in this life.

He came from a bunch of Irish sawmill workers and there was something in him that wanted to be more, but he didn’t know what that was. And he saw this kid that he thought might actually be loved by people. And that’s where it happened. I was the only one of the three that got the sh*t beat out of him. My middle brother did, to extent my younger brother, not at all. And so I realized he was jealous of me because of his own insecurity. And I felt bad for him.

DEADLINE: And that’s why you cried?

THORNTON: Yeah.

DEADLINE: Talk about striking a well. It feels like Taylor really hit something here that you can tell becomes a more dominant theme in this show’s second season.  

THORNTON: Not only do I love Sam, and we have such an easy relationship. You add that other sh*t onto it, it ain’t hard to do this.