Billy Bob Thornton returns to the oilfields of West Texas in the new season of Landman
It’s getting to the point that listing all of Taylor Sheridan’s hit shows is akin to counting the stars in the sky, yet Landman has proven to be a standout. Set amid the West Texas oil boom, the series focuses on Tommy Norris (played by Billy Bob Thornton), solver of problems for M-Tex Oil.
At the end of the debut season, M-Tex owner — and Tommy’s longtime friend — Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) suffered a fatal heart attack, placing control of the company in Tommy’s hands. When the series returns, Monty’s widow, Cami (Demi Moore), is forced to step into service to help Tommy fend off threats to her late husband’s empire. “In season two, as oil rises from the earth, so do secrets — and Tommy’s breaking point may be closer than he realizes,” reads the new season’s logline. “Facing mounting pressure from M-Tex Oil, Cami Miller and the shadow of his kin, survival in West Texas isn’t noble — it’s brutal. And sooner or later something’s got to break.”
Tommy has often been described as the role of Thornton’s already stellar career, and there’s a good reason for that. “Taylor wrote this series for me. I mean, specifically for me,” says Thornton. “ Because I had done that cameo for him in 1883, and he said, ‘I think I have your voice. I think I know how to write for you.’ And sure enough, when I read the first script of season one, I was like, ‘Yeah, you kind of got it down.’ ”
While Thornton has grown comfortable enough with Tommy to improvise occasionally, he’s also well aware that Sheridan has the final say. “Taylor writes really great scripts, so you don’t have to do much. But if you feel like something in the moment, you just say it. So yeah, every now and then [laughs] I throw one in. But I’m as dumb as a bag of hammers,” Thornton says. “If he likes it, he keeps it. And if he doesn’t, he dumps it, which is very fair.”
According to viewership numbers, Landman is Sheridan’s most-watched show, drawing a bigger audience than even established hits such as Yellowstone and Special Ops: Lioness. Thornton has a theory about why that is. “Landman has humour, it has absurdity, it has heavy drama, emotion, danger, all these different things,” he says. “So it kind of covers everything. And that’s the way the old movies were. You know, when we watched the movies of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, they always had all of that stuff. And I think that’s why people respond to it. And I think one of the charming things about these characters, all of them, is that they say exactly what they say. There’s no holding back. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what art is really supposed to be? Isn’t it supposed to be, there are no rules, there are no fences here?”
For Moore, Landman has been part of a career resurgence that culminated in her Oscar nod for The Substance. While Cami’s role was minor in the first season, she’s pushed to the forefront in the second. “Cami is facing a challenge that I’m grateful to say that I have not experienced, which is life after the loss of a partner, of a relationship that is really the foundation of her entire existence, and the stakes of that,” says Moore. “I think Cami is underestimated. She’s stepping into a world she doesn’t know except from the peripheral, and I think that she has the strength and resilience, which I also really identify with, to step in and take on the challenge no matter what the obstacles.”
Just as Tommy had Monty’s back, his bond with Cami is equally solid. “You see they all kind of started together,” says Moore. “And I think that he’s really, in a sense, her only anchor. He’s her anchor and kind of port in the storm as it were . . . But really, with Monty gone, Tommy really is everything that’s kind of holding her in place for a world that is about to explode beyond what she has any knowledge and experience of.”
A new arrival this season is Sam Elliott, who jumped at the chance to reunite with Sheridan after having previously worked together on the Yellowstone prequel 1883. “I think 1883 was one of the great experiences of my career. And the opportunity to go back and work with Taylor again . . .” Elliott says. “I happen to think he’s one of the most brilliant writers in the game today.”
Elliott plays T.L. Norris, Tommy’s estranged father, a role that he admits gave him pause. “Probably the most difficult thing was realizing that I was old enough to be Billy Bob Thornton’s dad,” Elliott says with a laugh. “I’m not even sure that I’ve accepted that yet.”
Working with Sheridan wasn’t Elliott’s only draw to Landman. “I happen to be a huge Billy Bob Thornton fan for a long, long time,” says Elliott, who first met Thornton when they worked together in the 1993 western Tombstone. “He’s very generous as an actor,” Elliott says of Thornton. “And he, needless to say, takes care of business. He knows what he’s there for . . . We work hard, and we commit to whatever it is we’re doing. Try to make it real. No acting, just try to be real.”
Ever since its premiere, Landman has stirred up controversy, with some contending the series romanticizes the oil industry during a time when everyone on the planet should be backing away from fossil fuels. It’s a question that Thornton has heard a lot, and shared his response when posed a question about that. “And she said, ‘How do you justify the morality of doing a show about the oil business?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’ll put it to you like this. If they figure out a way to run everything on Earth using water, the oil guys will get into the water business,’ ” Thornton quips.
“It’s a corporation, like the pharmaceutical companies or tech companies, anybody,” he adds. “They’re moneymakers. And so this show just shows you a peek behind the curtain of the oil business. It’s not a political thing. [Sheridan’s] not saying yay oil or boo oil. He’s just saying, here’s how it works. And I think because of that, people respond to it. Because it’s just showing you how it is. I mean, if you make a movie about a serial killer and everybody goes, ‘Oh my god, you know, Actor X was amazing playing the guy that eats people or whatever,’ you know. And then he gets the Academy Award for it . . . so you like serial killers? I don’t quite understand that. Because our job as artists is to portray whoever we’re portraying in an honest way. Taylor allows us to do that, and he writes it that way. And I think that’s all I have to say on that subject.”
Landman, streaming Sunday, November 23, Paramount+