The Man Who Is Everywhere

By Joel Stein

Billy Bob Thornton is on a mission to let you know he isn't weird. This is weird in and of itself, since he and his wife Angelina Jolie have spent a lot of time letting you know just how weird they are: wearing lockets with each other's blood around their necks, getting matching tattoos with secret symbols only they know the meaning of, and wearing each other's underwear. But now they want you to know all that stuff isn't so strange if you really think about it--or better yet if you don't think about it. Instead, they'd like you to know they spend most of their time watching the Game Show Network, playing board games and hanging out with their poodles. The Thorntons want to be taken seriously.

It shouldn't be all that hard, since no one could be as strange as they've been made out to be. Sure, they like attention an awful lot and have a strange kind of self-focused intensity you don't normally see after high school--they describe each other as "intense" and "heavy" and "feeling so much"--but they're also surprisingly smart and laid-back and un-Marilyn Mansony. And besides, if Jolie is going to continue to serve as the goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and Thornton is really going to have a shot at winning the best-actor Oscar in addition to being a respected indie writer-director who makes moody alt-country albums, they need to make sure people know they don't have a dungeon in their basement and he doesn't eat only orange-colored food and doesn't think he's the reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin. This is going to take him a while.

Thornton's seriousness comes through best in his work, including the three movies he's starring in this season: in Bandits, which opened last month, he plays a Woody Allenish neurotic bank robber; in the Coen brothers' retro film noir The Man Who Wasn't There, he's a poignantly understated 1940s Job; and in December's death-row drama Monster Ball, his depressed prison guard finds a reason for living in a mixed-race relationship with Halle Berry. This guy does all right for himself.

It's his stoic turn as the cuckolded barber in The Man Who Wasn't There that's generating the Oscar talk, despite the fact that the prize usually goes to more flamboyant roles. "The person who cries and screams at everybody wins the awards," Thornton says. "The hard part is becoming the character so much, you're not noticed."

Still, it's hard not to notice Thornton these days. In addition to the three films, he's all over Tower Records on posters for his first album, Private Radio (Lost Highway Records). He's been in bands since he was a high school drummer in a ZZ Top-influenced band, but his album is stark and John Prinish, with lyrics that may be hurting his current campaign: he sings about wearing women's underwear. Not only is Thornton planning to tour, but he's already writing songs for his third album, the one he'll do after the covers of '60s tunes he's currently recording in the basement studio of his house. If ever there were a need to be taken seriously, making an album with California Dreamin' on it is it.

So out of decency, let's help the guy. Sure, he and Jolie are awfully affectionate in public, and there is no possible universe where a 46-year-old guy that skinny, pale, twitchy and allergic could be married to Jolie, 26. But if such a universe existed, what could be more normal than his making sure they are all over each other nearly all the time. In the NBC-sent limo, on his way to an appearance on Jay Leno, he paws her, his index and middle fingers digging into her clavicle. If you look closely at them making out, which is car-wreck-impossible to turn away from, you can see that often when they kiss they are actually a few millimeters apart, liplessly whispering to each other. Jolie uses this form of communication for lots of things, some of them not romantic. In the Leno green room, she uses the kiss-whisper to advise her husband not to talk about watching Saved by the Bell because it will make him look stupid. Thornton is smart enough not to disagree. "The Tonight Show is the only place I get stains on my armpits," he confides on the ride home.

He fulfilled his mission on Leno well, sitting up really straight and making sure he mentioned the board games and the game-show channel. But it's not so easy. After finally getting famous late in life and exploiting every weirdness to get there, he now has to work just as hard to exploit his normality, which is going to take a lot longer. It's hard to get people to talk about your favorite board games. Especially when you have a locketful of blood around your neck.