How Billy Bob Thornton's Last Minute Cameo in1883Turned Into a Lead Role in Taylor Sheridan'sLandman

Mar. 15, 2025

Billy Bob Thornton.Photo:Jesse Grant/Getty

Jesse Grant/Getty

Billy Bob Thornton’s willingness to hop on a flight led to a role of a lifetime.

During a Q&A session at aLandmanscreening in Nashville, Tenn., the actor, 69, revealed how series creatorTaylor Sheridanwrote the series with him in mind after he agreed to film a brief cameo in1883.

“Taylor called me one time and said, ‘I wrote a cameo in this thing I’m doing called1883and would you come to Fort Worth for two days to do two scenes? I need a guy who has done this before. Can you come shoot everybody in the saloon and leave?’" Thornton recalled Sheridan saying. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, I can.’”

Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris in ‘Landman’.Emerson Miller/Paramount

Emerson Miller/Paramount

After the big event, he recalled having dinner with Sheridan, who revealed, “I’m writing a show for you calledLandmanand it’s about the oil business in Texas. It’s based on this podcastBoomtown.”

“He kind of explained it to me and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,'” Thornton continued, admitting how he was pleasantly surprised with the script. “And then, I read it and thought, ‘That’s even more interesting than I thought it was gonna be.'”

According to the offical logline,Landman, which premieres on Paramount+ on Nov. 16, tells a “modern-day tale of fortune-seeking in the world of oil rigs… an upstairs/downstairs story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires that are fueling a boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy and our geopolitics.”

The series will also starJon Hamm,Demi MooreandAli Larter, among others.

In a conversation with PEOPLE in March, Hamm explained why Landman will be an “interesting” pivot for Sheridan, who’s known for telling western stories of cowboys and ranch hands.

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“There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of intrigue and things like that,” Hamm noted. “It’s Taylor Sheridan and obviously it’s very well written. It’s very well-researched. It’s a story very well told, and I think it’s an interesting take on what happens when it comes to how we get the stuff that makes our cars and our lives and our planes and everything in our modern world go.”

source: people.com