Billy Bob Thornton Recalls His Hollywood Marriage and Acid-Dropping Heyday on Ann Wilson’s Podcast

Actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton sat for an intimate and revealing interview with rock legend Ann Wilson on her new podcast, After Dinner Thinks, where their wide-ranging conversation dipped into his Hollywood life with ex-wife Angelina Jolie, his OCD, dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder and included a reminisce from both musicians on past use of hallucinogens, with the Heart singer sharing a story about seeing Rosemary’s Baby on a date while on acid.

Thornton’s candid chat with Wilson is being released as the second season of his Taylor Sheridan-produced series, Landman, has begun streaming on Paramount+. The interview with Thornton in Nashville marks the ninth episode of Wilson’s podcast, which features rock performances from the vocalist who has fronted Heart since the 1970s, including a rollicking cover of the 1963 Lesley Gore staple, “You Don’t Own Me.”

In the loose and intimate conversation, the two big-name celebrities are strikingly candid and the famously relaxed Thornton, who shot to fame in the early 1990s as an unlikely leading man in his Oscar-winning Sling Blade, discussed his rejection of the Hollywood lifestyle as his industry stock rose amid his May-December courtship and marriage to mega-hot star Jolie. The two were married for three years and split in 2003; Thornton has been married to his sixth wife, Connie Angland, since 2014. 

“We live out between L.A. and Santa Barbara — there are recording studios there and my family lives there and that’s pretty much where I stay. You don’t see me in People magazine, on the star tracks, red carpet stuff, I just don’t deal with it,” Thornton said. “People say, ‘How do you describe your longevity? How does that happen?’ I said, ‘Well, I never really joined. That’s basically it. I just never was much part of it when Angelina and I were married. She and I both were in the public eye all the time, but mostly I don’t go to the parties. I don’t hang out with all the agents and executives and stuff like that.”

In segments of the interview provided to The Hollywood Reporter in advance of the episode’s debut online on Nov. 20, Thornton and Wilson discuss the ups and downs of being professional musicians and the vulnerability that’s necessary in stage performances. At 70 and 75 years old, respectively, Thornton and Wilson also talk about the awkwardness of discussing the legends of their heyday with young people who have no idea who country music mainstay Bill Anderson or guitar legend Steven Lee Cropper are. 

Thornton may be best known for his film career, which garnered him an Oscar for his Sling Blade screenplay and two acting nominations, but in tandem, he’s had a career in rock music. Over the past several decades, he has released four solo albums and 19 records with his band, The Boxmasters. Formed in California in the mid-1990s, the band consists of Thornton on vocals and Grammy Award-winning recording engineer J.D. Andrew. 

Over the past 30 years, as his music career teetered in and out of activity, Thornton carved out a unique Hollywood persona that has led to multiple collaborations with the Coen Brothers (Intolerable Cruelty, The Man Who Wasn’t There), an unlikely holiday staple (Bad Santa) and the opportunity to direct several films, including All the Pretty Horses and Jayne Mansfield’s Car. Thornton has previously discussed his Hollywood career as “an accident” and, while speaking on Wilson’s podcast, delves into the perceived obstacles that he sees as his strengths throughout his varied career in show business.

“I had to learn a lot of dialogue very quickly. … I’m as dumb as a bag of hair, but thank God I got a memory — that’s about all I’ve got,” he recalled. “I have severe obsessive compulsive disorder; I have an anxiety disorder. I grew up dyslexic. All these things, but I think because of those things, I am able to read in chunks. I don’t read left or right slowly, like most people do.”

Thornton went on to discuss how his daughter — one of four children he has fathered — is also on the autism spectrum, like him. This can impact, in various ways and levels of severity, how someone communicates, socializes and interacts with the world.

“My daughter is going to Cal Poly right now. She’s just turned 21, and she inherited some of my things  and I’m actually on the spectrum, I stutter, all these different things. So my daughter has all that, anxiety and OCD. She’s not dyslexic — that’s the only one she didn’t get. 

Thornton tells Wilson that he and his daughter discuss these disorders “all the time.” 

“[We talk] about how these things that are looked at by the public as detriments,” he tells her. “But they’re actually strengths, especially in the arts. Because if you check through history, you can’t tell me that Van Gogh and those guys weren’t on the spectrum. But I haven’t cut off any body parts yet!”

As the conversation grows more personal and reminiscent, the two legends get into their history with drug use — in particular, using acid while they were younger. Thornton gets candid about his history with psychedelics and why he kept doing acid even though he hated it.

“I do believe it did unlock my mind to be a better artist,” he said. “I honestly believe that psychedelics helped me as a writer and as an artist in general. I’m glad I quit when I did, because I was a skinny, little, long-haired hippie working as a roadie, and I looked in a mirror at an Airstream trailer one night. I was like, ‘You’re gonna die. You have to stop.’”

Wilson, for her part as a rock legend, one-ups him on this front with a hallucinogen horror story about a date, a tab of acid and a drive-in screening of Roman Polanski’s horror-thriller Rosemary’s Baby.

“Everything was wrong with the picture,” Wilson recalls. “And man, was that ever the worst trip I ever had. And I got home finally, to my parents’ house, where I still lived, and just spent the rest of the night just tossing and turning, just being so freaked out.”