The Everywhere Man

Standing in the rear garage of the Sunset Marquis Hotel off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie are locked in a tight embrace, gazing into each other’s eyes as she kisses his earlobe.

“I have this thing about his earlobe,” Jolie confides, running a finger along her husband’s left ear. “I just want to bite it off so many times.”

Somewhat clumsily, a reporter who has come to interview Thornton asks the Oscar-winning actress why she is so obsessed with his earlobe.

“Because I don’t have any,” she explains, showing off her lobe-less left ear.

The reporter then asks, again clumsily, if it’s the earlobe that attracts her most to her husband.

“It’s everything,” she giggles as Thornton whispers, “Hey, baby.”

The American public hasn’t seen that much of Billy Bob Thornton since he played enigmatic cowboy air traffic controller Russell Bell in Mike Newell’s 1999 dark comedy “Pushing Tin.”

“I haven’t had anything out in a long time, other than ‘All the Pretty Horses,’ but I directed it,” Thornton says as he sits down for the interview in a hotel suite, poking a fork into a plateful of sliced papaya.

That low profile, however, will soon change because Thornton is starring in four films in the next six months. He appears with Bruce Willis and Cate Blanchett in the MGM buddy comedy “Bandits,” arriving Friday. Then he stars in the Coen brothers’ noirish “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” which USA Films will release in Los Angeles and New York on Halloween. At year’s end, he stars with Heath Ledger, Halle Berry and Peter Boyle in the Lions Gate prison drama “Monster’s Ball,” and next March he and Charlize Theron are in the Miramax comedy “Waking Up in Reno.”

Thornton has also cut an album called “Private Radio,” which hit record stores Sept. 25. The album includes an ode to his wife titled “Angelina” and has earned some decent reviews, with The Times saying his songs resemble Kris Kristofferson’s work in the ‘70s. Thornton plans a nationwide tour after the first of the year.

Is Thornton worried about overexposure?

“The thing that helps me out, I believe, is I don’t play myself,” Thornton says in a soft Arkansas twang. “People aren’t seeing the same guy four movies in a row.

“I play very extreme characters. I think people allow me more freedom in that area. I was lucky.”

And extreme characters they are.

Who can forget the mentally challenged murderer Karl Childers in his 1996 “Sling Blade.” Thornton, who also wrote and directed the film, was nominated for best actor and won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, in the process becoming one of Hollywood’s most sought-after talents.

The next year, he was barely recognizable as the psychotic mechanic Darrell opposite Sean Penn in Oliver Stone’s “U Turn.” He received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in the 1998 film “A Simple Plan,” as the slow-witted brother of Bill Paxton.

If you ask Thornton how he chooses his roles, he doesn’t hesitate: the written word.

“If the writing is good, the story is good and the characters are well-developed, that’s how I see the movie,” he says.

“My wife and I have both played characters that are nothing like us, yet whatever anger we have, whatever darkness or weirdness or happiness or joy, you can use that and put it in the character, even though you may not behave like that character,” he observes. “You can have some emotional place to go.

“With the character in ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ and the one in ‘Bandits,”’ he adds, “I would say there is a section of me in both of those characters, just as there was in ‘A Simple Plan,’ which is probably a character closer to me than almost any I’ve ever played.”

Barry Levinson, who directed “Bandits,” believes that Thornton is not unlike some of the great character actors of the past.

“He finds a way to interpret a role that we connect to,” Levinson says. “He wasn’t just this odd somebody in ‘Sling Blade.’ Audiences connected to him. That’s what good acting is all about. It’s not just filling time on the screen.”

It is Thornton’s ability to morph into a variety of extreme characters that intrigued the Coens, who cast him as barber Ed Crane. Like “Fargo,” the Coens’ Oscar-nominated 1996 film, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” offers precise character studies that demand a lot of the actors.

Thornton’s role is perhaps especially difficult because his character is extremely passive, hiding his emotions behind an absolutely blank mask as he puffs on an ever-present cigarette.

“He’s a character actor in the best sense of the word,” Ethan Coen says. “I think some superstars feel they get trapped in their established screen persona over and over again. That’s what they get hired to do. But somebody like Billy Bob has the freedom to go in and be Ed Crane in one movie or the hypochondriac in ‘Bandits.”’

“Ed Crane is a very challenging part,” Joel Coen notes. “He is basically nothing, and it’s hard to play nothing without being really dull, which Billy Bob really isn’t at all.”

Set in a small Northern California town in the summer of 1949, the movie introduces Crane at a time when he is dissatisfied with his life. When he learns that his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), is having an affair with a wealthy department store owner, “Big Dave” (James Gandolfini), he decides to turn the situation to his advantage, setting in motion a scheme that has unanticipated results.

In “Bandits,” Thornton plays Terry Collins, a jabbering neurotic who is the opposite of the taciturn Crane.

Thornton identifies with Collins in one respect--”I can be neurotic. I am very phobic.”

One particular phobia he shares with his “Bandits” character is antique furniture.

“Barry Levinson heard about it and asked me one day, ‘What’s this I hear that you’re scared of antiques?”’ Thornton recalls. “I said, ‘I’m not scared of them. I can’t breathe around them and I get real weird about them.’ I went into this [restaurant] one time out by the Van Nuys Airport and just froze. Couldn’t even have a bite. Couldn’t even drink my water.”

He’s unsure exactly how long he has had this phobia, but “I do remember it was there when I was a kid.”

Marriage to Jolie has helped him overcome a lifelong fear of flying “because the reasons I have to fly are greater.”

“I’m a little bit like a hillbilly version of Woody Allen, you know what I mean? I’ll never forget the whole thing when [Woody] tells Diane Keaton to come into the bathroom and says, ‘There’s a spider in [the] bathroom as big as a Buick.”’ Thornton chuckles and says he knows exactly what was going through Allen’s mind when he wrote that scene.

Although he admits to being superstitious, Thornton believes the media have blown his eccentricities way out of proportion.

It has been widely reported, for example, that he is on a diet in which he eats only orange-colored foods. He does eat papaya (a yellowish tropical fruit) every day for lunch, because he believes it’s good for the digestive system.

“They asked somebody on one of these [television] shows one day what the stars eat, and somebody at some restaurant said, ‘He comes in here all the time and he only eats papaya,”’ Thornton says, shaking his head. That things like this aren’t true, he adds, is “almost disappointing to people.”

He also doesn’t think it’s at all weird that he and Jolie wear tiny vials of each other’s blood around their necks.

“It’s just simply that for Christmas, Angie got these vials,” he says. “We got a little thing and poked our fingers, and we put [our blood] in there so when we’re apart we have a little bit of each other.

“I was telling somebody the other day, we do things in real life that are really romantic and very pleasant together,” he adds. “If these things are in a movie, the audience would love it and they would think, ‘Oh, how romantic.’ And then in real life, you show people that and they think you’re weird. I mean, these are good things. They’re not negative things. They’re positive things.”

Although he has quit smoking, Thornton says he would never lay a burning cigarette or any sharp objects down pointing in the direction of any loved ones.

If that sounds quirky, ponder some lyrics he wrote on his album on a track called “Forever.” The verse goes:

Hey, baby, it’s me again

Hey, you remember them drawers you left in the car?

Yeah, the ones with the pink feathers around the edge?

Don’t tell a soul, but I got them on right now, and they made me think about you.

“There’s a lot of humor in the song,” he says. “It’s just a funny road trip song. The song isn’t even about me [and Jolie]. Not that we haven’t [worn each other’s underwear]. Not in a weird way like you think. It’s in a fun way. I said one time in an article that I wore her underwear when she was [away]. We were just joking about it.”

Reared in Malvern, Ark., Thornton still exudes a down-home manner that two decades in Hollywood haven’t polished away.

For this interview, he arrives in an unbuttoned paisley shirt with a black T-shirt and baseball cap. His mustache and goatee are flecked with gray, his skin is tanned, but his taut frame is a shadow of the dumpy figure he cut in “Sling Blade.”

Contrary to rumors of illness, Thornton says he always was thin and that “Sling Blade” was an exception.

One of four children of a high school coach and a small-town psychic, he experienced “a weird home life in a lot of ways, because my dad was a hotheaded little Irish basketball coach. It’s very funny, but our living room had a coffee table with magazines on it like you were going to a doctor’s office and clients going to see my mother. Like, there’d be all these ladies in the living room and they all have this perfume smell.”

Thornton and his boyhood pal Tom Epperson wrote a movie released last year called “The Gift.” It starred Cate Blanchett as a poor young woman with psychic powers. The role was loosely based on his mom.

“My mother actually used to speak at medical conventions on parapsychology,” Thornton says. “She was like the real thing. She was tested at Duke University.”

Growing up in Malvern, Thornton had two dreams: to play in a band and pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals.

“I was a good pitcher,” he recalls. “I was a junk pitcher. I threw a screwball, slider, curveball, good change-up. My best pitch was a slider. I had a good, hard slider. I wasn’t a fireballer. These days, you have to throw 90 mph.”

He even attended a tryout with the Kansas City Royals, but a throw from third to first sailed past the first baseman and broke Thornton’s collarbone, eliminating that field of dreams.

One of Thornton’s greatest thrills was the day a few years back when he was invited to throw out the first pitch before a game at Busch Stadium. St. Louis Manager Tony LaRussa mentioned to the Cards’ hall of fame pitcher Bob Gibson that he was the actor’s boyhood idol, and to Thornton’s amazement, Gibson crouched behind the plate and caught the pitch.

After high school, Thornton formed a soul group called Hot ‘Lanta, after the Allman Brothers song of the same name. He went on to play drums and share lead vocals for a band called Nothin’ Doin’, which later changed its name to Tres Hombres and began touring.

But Malvern couldn’t keep him forever. With his chum Epperson at his side, they headed for New York City in 1977, then made their way to Hollywood. By the early 1980s, Thornton was taking acting lessons.

He appeared on a number of TV shows, ranging from an episode of “Matlock” to TV movies such as “Circus.” In 1989, he made his TV series debut as an actor in “The Outsiders” on Fox. A year later, he was making guest appearances on “Evening Shade,” produced by Arkansas couple Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. They later cast him in the featured role of Billy Bob Davis on the series “Hearts Afire.”

After “Sling Blade,” his film career took off, and he hasn’t looked back. His roles have always been varied, whether it was the wily James Carville-like political advisor in “Primary Colors” or the Mission Control leader in “Armageddon.”

He also directed last year’s “All the Pretty Horses,” starring Matt Damon, which he adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel. The movie was seen as an admirable failure.

At the same time his career was blooming, his private life was becoming increasingly complicated.

His fourth wife, Pietra Dawn Cherniak, whom he married in 1993 and who is the mother of two of his three children, filed for divorce in 1997. She claimed spousal abuse, an accusation Thornton strongly denied.

After that marriage dissolved, he began dating actress Laura Dern, with whom he made a movie that has yet to be released called “Daddy and Them.” But his relationship with Dern came to an abrupt end in 1999, about the time Jolie entered his life. Thornton reportedly had been engaged to Dern when he and Jolie got married in Las Vegas.

By all appearances, Billy Bob loves his Angie and Angie adores Billy Bob. He is 46. She is 26. He is on his fifth marriage; she, her second.

Her name is tattooed on his forearm and lower leg; his is on her shoulder and lower stomach. That doesn’t include the mysterious script, the meaning of which only they know, that decorates both their forearms.

Midway through the interview, Jolie joins Thornton on the couch. Dressed in tight, black jeans and a white blouse with her hair pulled back in a clamp, she slides behind him, curling her body around her husband’s and affectionately stroking his arm as a reporter continues asking questions.

They married each other twice--once on the spur of the moment at one of those Las Vegas wedding chapels, and once at their house in Beverly Hills. For them, even twice doesn’t seem sufficient.

“We want to get married in different countries in different ways, different customs,” Jolie discloses.

“We love getting married,” Thornton affirms.

The reporter asks Jolie if she remembers meeting Thornton.

She giggles.

“I got very nervous and I walked into a wall,” she says. “We were in an elevator. We had already been cast together [in ‘Pushing Tin’]. We were out in Toronto. We hadn’t met yet. I know we walked out into the lobby and walked out. He was on his way to wardrobe and I was just going for a walk.” She looks up at Thornton. “And I remember you said something, I don’t know what it was, but it was about your ‘retaining clothes.”’

She laughs at the recollection.

“I was going to try on pants,” Thornton reminds her.

“You were going to try on pants” she agrees, “and, for some reason, I couldn’t handle it at all and I remember your car drives up and I remember leaning against the wall and I was thinking, ‘What was that? What happened? Why can’t I breathe?”’

It isn’t just physical. To her, she says, he is “the favorite person you want to talk with, the person you’re most comfortable with, the person that makes you laugh the most or feel good about things. You know what I mean? Or, calms you down when you’re excited. It’s just everything.”

Despite their star status and the fact that she is now a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations (she recently donated $1 million to the U.N.’s Afghanistan Refugee Relief Fund), Thornton and Jolie say they live pretty ordinary lives--ruled at home by two white poodles named Muskrat and Poodle.

To keep fit, Thornton and Jolie like to bounce together on a backyard trampoline. He says, “It’s astounding how, at the end of 20 minutes, you’re just exhausted. But it’s fun. It’s not like running on a treadmill, which is not fun.”

He also says they are regular viewers of the Game Show Network. Two of his favorite game shows are “Match Game” with host Gene Rayburn and “The $100,000 Pyramid” with host Dick Clark. Thornton adds that two of his favorite movies are “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” with Don Knotts and “Lt. Robin Crusoe” with Dick Van Dyke.

Just your average couple.

Of course, one might ask how any couple could openly display such affection in front of strangers--especially members of the media.

As you watch them gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, you come to the conclusion they really don’t care what people think. *