Billy Bob Thornton Sees Longevity With ‘Landman’ Series

Deep in the heart of Texas one might think of cowboys, cattle and rodeos. But Landman, the new series co-created by Christian Wallace and Yellowstone boss Taylor Sheridan, wants viewers to also think about Texas tea and black gold with the new streaming offering about the oil business starring Billy Bob Thornton.

Based on journalist-screenwriter Wallace’s Boomtown podcast, from Imperative Entertainment and Texas Monthly, the Paramount+ series explores the multi-billion dollar oil industry in West Texas in a story-telling style that is likely to remind viewers of Sheridan’s mega-hit Paramount Network saga Yellowstone. The podcast focused on the Permian Basin in West Texas in 2019.

Although the oil fields, known as “the patch,” were producing significant amount of product and paying the lowest workers in the fields hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the community in West Texas also faced high rents, schools that were overcrowded and some of the deadliest work anyone could do. Death was — and is — a common occurrence for those working out in the patch.

In a recent conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Thornton explained where his character fits in. He plays Tommy Norris, an executive and “fixer” for the fictional oil company in the series, which is owned by his billionaire boss, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm).

“Yeah, that’s essentially it,” said Thornton, agreeing with his character being a fixer. “A landman is a guy that procures the leases for the land and then is in charge of running the crews that work them. And he’s also responsible for making sure it makes money for his boss who owns the oil company; so, ‘fixer’ is a good way to put it. It’s a big job. It’s a lot of responsibility. A lot of driving in your truck. A lot of going out to oil fields. A lot of going to meet with your boss in his mansion. Like a glorified foreman in a lot of ways.”

One interesting aspect of Thornton’s character is discovered in the first scene of the first episode, when Norris is being held hostage in a shed in the middle of nowhere, shackled to a chair with a hood over his face. It’s clear he’s been beaten. As the scene plays out, viewers discover that Norris is there to negotiate land rights with a cartel who wants to run drugs through private roads that run through valuable oil fields. The dealings between cartels and oil companies somewhat surprised Thornton, but he learned such situations are not so far-fetched.

“Tommy has to deal with a lot of different people who work within close proximity to each other,” Thornton explained. “Cattlemen have their thing. Oilmen have their thing, but that’s probably an easier relationship because it’s just a business thing where you kind of work it out, and maybe you don’t see eye to eye at all the time.”

He continued, “But with the cartel, that’s a different story because there’s danger involved. One of the things that I didn’t know before I started working on this — I knew some of the stuff about the oil business — I didn’t realize how these cartels will use that land sometimes. It’s almost like strange bedfellows. It’s like, ‘We’re sharing this. I’m not big on your world; you’re not big on mine. So, okay, go ahead do your thing. But stay out of our way and we’ll stay out of yours.’”

Wallace, co-creator of Landman, doesn’t believe his story is necessarily an extension of Yellowstone, but he does see it as part of the Sheridan-verse of storytelling. Yellowstone, TV’s No. 1 series, is also currently rolling out its season 5B on Sundays, which was announced to be the final in the flagship series; though a possible sixth season has been in talks and several spinoffs are in production.

“I have not seen the final season [of Yellowstone], but I do think that it works well in his world,” Wallace told THR about Landman. “I think it’s distinct from that story, but also in line with [that universe]. It makes sense in this world that [Taylor’s] created.”

Of course, Landman started with Wallace’s podcast, and then it took some years to get the production going, he explained.

“Taylor and his producing partners acquired the rights sometime in late 2020,” Wallace said of the 2019 podcast. “Then it was two years of talking with Taylor about it, talking story and characters; two strikes and a pandemic later, and all these other things. And here we are, five years later, having this conversation about Landman.”

Along with Thornton and Hamm, Landman’s cast also includes Demi Moore, Ali Larter, Michelle Randolph and Jacob Lofland, and will see Andy Garcia and Michael Peña in guest roles.

“The very first domino in this whole thing, that Taylor knew from the get-go, was that he wanted Billy Bob to be Tommy Norris, our main character,” said Wallace. “Everything kind of cascaded down from that that. The casting was fun, it’s a quite an ensemble.”

Thornton recently spoke about how Sheridan pitched him the Landman project following his cameo in Yellowstone prequel 1883. He told THR previously that they kept in touch and that when he attended the show’s premiere, they went to dinner afterwards where Sheridan told him, “‘I’m writing a show for you called Landman. I’m gonna write it in your voice and it’s the world of the oil business, and here’s the kind of character it is.’ And when I read the first script I was like, ‘Boy, he did write it in my voice didn’t he!’ (Laughs)”

Although there haven’t been talks yet beyond this season, Thornton now says he doesn’t see any reason why the series won’t have longevity.

“Initially, we just talked about this season,” said Thornton. “But the idea going into it is that it would be open-ended, that was the possibility. And hopefully that’s the case. We’ll see.”

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Landman releases new episodes Sundays on Paramount+.

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