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Billy Bob Thornton: Why I Turned Down Two Huge Villain Roles

Thornton explained why he doesn’t “have much interest in those kinds of roles” in a new interview.

Billy Bob Thornton isn’t interested in villain roles and he’s turned down two huge jobs to prove it, he revealed on a new episode of The Playlist’s “Bingeworthy” podcast. “I don’t have much interest in those kinds of roles,” Thornton said, before divulging two films in which he declined to be the “bad guy”— Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). “If you’re the bad guy in a big movie like that, audiences remember it forever,” he said on the podcast. But he also had other reasons. “With the Green Goblin, I didn’t feel like getting up at 4 a.m. for five or six hours of makeup,” he said, of the role that was ultimately played by Willem Dafoe. “And with Mission: Impossible III, I didn’t want to be the guy trying to kill Tom Cruise,” he added, referencing the role of Owen Davian, which was played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Makeup and Tom Cruise aside, the veteran actor said he mostly wanted to avoid being typecast, saying on the show, “I prefer to keep things looser and less predictable.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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