Billy Bob Thornton passed on ‘Mission Impossible’ villain role so he wouldn’t be ‘the guy who tries to kill Tom Cruise’

CNN
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Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t mind playing a bad guy, but there are some lines he wants to draw.

During a performance on The Playlist’s “Bingeworthy” podcastthe acclaimed actor spoke about turning down roles as villains in two notable films.

Thornton said he was approached to play Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man.” Years later, he was ready for the role of the villain in “Mission: Impossible 3”.

“I don’t have much interest in those kinds of roles,” he said. “With Green Goblin, I didn’t want to get up at 4 in the morning for five or six hours of makeup… And with ‘Mission: Impossible III,’ I didn’t want to be the guy who tried to kill Tom Cruise. If you’re the bad guy in a big movie like that, the audience remembers it forever. I prefer to keep things looser and less predictable.”

There is ample opportunity to see him in bad guy roles in projects including “Armageddon” and “Bad Santa.”

Thornton currently stars as an oil company fixer in Texas in Taylor Sheridan’s series titled “Landman”.