Billy Bob Thornton gets the most out of his on screen performances because many of them echo his crazy life. Billy Bob Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas on August 4, 1955. In his life Billy Bob Thornton has been married 5 times, has had 5 children, and he has been a drummer in a rock band that once opened for country star Hank Williams Jr. But it is in acting and writing that Billy Bob Thornton would soon shine and he moved to Hollywood to pursue his dream to become an actor. He moved to Hollywood with his friend Tom Epperson to try and sell their movie scripts around Hollywood but they couldn’t sell a single one to any producer in town. Billy Bob Thornton soon developed a disregard for his health and it put him in the hospital with heart problems at a very young age. Through all of that Billy Bob Thornton has carved out a piece of the Hollywood life for himself as a self-made success story that includes two Oscar wins and several hit movies to his credit.

Billy Bob Thornton first came into the public view in 1994 with a short film that he wrote and starred in called They Call It A Sling Blade. In it he played the mental patient Karl Childers who was in a mental hospital for killing two people. In the 25 minute short movie a reporter has come to interview Karl as he is just about ready to be released from the mental hospital and she wants to hear his story. The story she gets shocks her and it is a strange tale of Karl’s childhood. Billy Bob Thornton showed an incredible acting range in this short movie and it would not be long before his hard work to put out the short would pay off big time. Two years later in 1996 Billy Bob Thornton burst onto the movie going scene with the movie Sling Blade which was the full length version of They Call It A Sling Blade and it was a movie that Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed, and starred in. His dedication to his reprisal of the role of Karl Childers was amazing as he even went so far as to put broken glass in his shoes to help him create a distinct walk. To watch Billy Bob Thornton play Karl Childers you would never know it was Billy Bob. His facial contortions, his manner of speaking, and the way he moved was nothing at all like Billy Bob Thornton. In this sense it showed the incredible range and brilliance of Billy Bob Thornton.

Sling Blade was a huge financial success and even won an Oscar for Billy Bob Thornton’s writing and now the world was ready for more Billy Bob Thornton. Billy Bob appeared in many successful films after Sling Blade including the massive hit Armageddon and Monster’s Ball but it was his performance in the 2003 dark comedy Bad Santa that put Billy Bob Thornton permanently on the Hollywood map. In Bad Santa Billy Bob plays a drunk con man that plays Santa every year with his mean little assistant elf and on Christmas eve the two rob the store they are working in. In the movie Thornton’s character takes up residence with a hopeless kid who thinks Billy Bob is the real Santa and the kid’s clueless grandmother. In the end the kid winds up reforming Billy Bob and the movie has quite an explosive ending. Bad Santa was a huge success and even though it did not help to shake the lovable drunk loser roles that Billy Bob seems to be cast into every so often, it did help to make him into what the movie going public loves today.