Billy Bob Thornton lost three close friends in quick succession. Warren Zevon, John Ritter and Johnny Cash were all collaborators and confidantes, and their deaths — within four days of each other — left the Arkansas–born actor thinking more than ever about mortality.
“It sure does bring it all home to you,” Thornton says. “Because when we were 25, we didn’t think about this kind of stuff. Now, it’s like your friends are dropping like flies all around you, it’s right in your face.”
The Edge of the World, the 48–year–old Thornton’s second album, was released this week. On Sept. 7, he had just finished a cross–country tour with his rock ‘n’ roll band when the news came that Zevon had lost his battle with cancer. The Oscar–winning writer, director and star of Sling Blade maintains a healthy second career in music, and he sang on Zevon’s final album, The Wind.
In a phone interview from his Los Angeles home, Thornton recalled first encountering Zevon in the late 1980s at the mailbox outside their apartment complex.
“It was just so fantastic to meet somebody else who had obsessive–compulsive disorder,” Thornton said. “Because he saw me taking my mail out, putting it back in, taking it out and locking it twice. And he said ‘So you got that too, huh?'”
So developed a fast friendship. “It was pretty amazing knowing Warren. You know when you meet somebody who thinks differently than everybody else? They have their own thing that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. I just loved being around Warren. Dwight Yoakam and Warren and I used to hang out a lot together.”
In 1992, Thornton got one of his first Hollywood jobs, in the cast of John Ritter’s sitcom Hearts Afire. Between takes, Thornton liked to crack Ritter up with the mentally challenged hillbilly character he’d use four years later as the centerpiece of Sling Blade.
Thornton wrote another character in the film, the neurotic, gay grocery–store manager, with Ritter in mind.
“I knew what he could do, but he wasn’t given that chance very often,” Thornton said. “Everybody pigeonholed him into that guy that trips over the furniture.
“He used to do this weird thing where he would be sitting next to you someplace, and all of a sudden his hand would creep onto your knee. When you’d look at him like ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he would say ‘Oh, yeah, like I’m gay.’
“And his body language — I knew he could play the guy. Once I started writing the script, it was him all the way.”
For the film, Ritter was given a really, really strange haircut, a sort of regulation–Army buzz gone bad.
“The first thing we shot together was that scene in the diner, where he tells me he’s gay,” Thornton recalled. “And he just couldn’t hold himself together. He’d just look at me — I was in character — and bust up. So he had to get past that, and he said ‘Man, I hate you for this. For the haircut and everything.'”
The pair worked together again in director Terry Zwigoff’s comedy Bad Santa, which will be released in November. Ritter played the mall manager who hires Thornton, a con man, to play Santa Claus.
Thornton said Ritter got him back for the Sling Blade episode. “The facial expressions he does in ‘Bad Santa’ are priceless,” he explained. “I couldn’t keep a straight face. And here I’m supposed to be this dry guy who can’t stand him. I couldn’t even do the scenes with him half the time, just the way he stood, and rubbed his hands together.”
On Sept. 11, Thornton was home and thinking about Zevon, who’d passed away four days earlier. Someone called and told him Ritter had died suddenly, from an undiagnosed heart problem.
Yoakam — the country singer who’d also starred in Sling Blade and knew Ritter well — called next, and he and Thornton spent four hours on the phone, talking about their fallen friend.
“The next morning, I woke up and Cash had died. It was so numbing. I had just talked to Cash a few weeks ago.”
Johnny Cash died Sept. 12 after a history of illness.
Around 1998, Cash had sought Thornton out. “He called me and wanted to know if I would autograph a copy of U–Turn,” Thornton said. “He loved that movie. Cash was an edgy guy; he loved anything kinda offbeat. And I couldn’t believe he even called me, let alone wanted one of my movies.”
Thornton said Daddy and Them, which Thornton also wrote and starred in, was another favorite at Cash’s house.
“We just started talking on the phone a lot, and when I’d go to Nashville I would see him. He and I ended up doing a duet together on a song, and he was going to record my song ‘Private Radio.'”
The flood of bad news came just as Thornton was about to re–enter the limelight; he has a small role in the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty (Oct. 10), then Bad Santa, followed at Christmas by Disney’s The Alamo, in which he stars as Davy Crockett.
The Edge of the World, he says, is “a veiled concept record, meaning it’s not as obvious a concept record as, say, Tommy or Red Headed Stranger.
“It’s the story of a broken man on his way to healing. It’s a guy who has a desire for love, for some sort of life, and then he dies.
“And in the end, he realizes what’s really important, which is your home and your family and being able to walk out the door every day and be alive.”
Thornton’s divorce last year from Angelina Jolie has fueled speculation that the more somber songs on The Edge of the World might have been inspired by the breakup.
“It’s pretty damned autobiographical, but it’s not all a specific reference to something that people would actually know. For instance, they’re already talking on the entertainment shows about the song ‘The Desperate One,’ about why I’m so desperate to get back with Angelina. And that’s just not true. That was someone totally unrelated to her.”
Jolie was seemingly on every magazine cover in the United States over the summer, talking about the couple’s less–than–amicable split.
Thornton swears he didn’t read any of it. “She doesn’t mean any harm toward me,” he said. “I mean, I know that. I know her. She’s not going to say anything about me, and if she does I’d be very surprised. We were friends, and hopefully will be at some point in the future.
“So it’s not surprising to me that she’s not slamming me because I don’t think that’s her style. And I wish people would leave her alone, too, I really do.”
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t thinking about it these days.
“I didn’t lose it at John’s funeral until I was walking out with my two little boys,” he said. “We were passing the casket, and I saw John’s kids sitting there in the front row of the church. And I made eye contact with Jason, his eldest son. When I looked at that kid, I couldn’t hold myself together.
“I went to Warren’s memorial. And I heard about Cash’s. People were kind of settled into the fact, I think, because we knew these guys were going to die. But at John’s funeral, it was just a bunch of people walking around stunned.”
@2003 Bill DeYoung (published by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers)