I can control the craziness, y’know

In a town not unused to eccentricity it is probably fair to say that Billy Bob Thornton is Hollywood’s strangest actor. It began with his reported phobia of antique furniture, suitcases and potatoes and seemed to be confirmed by the bizarre rites attached to his marriage to Angelina Jolie in 2000.

First the couple reserved adjacent grave plots in Arkansas and took to wearing vials of one another’s blood around their necks, then he gave her a proclamation, signed in his own blood, stating that they would be together for eternity.

In the event they divorced three years later, but his strange tastes persist. Take the latest purchase for his Hollywood Hills home: a photo-booth. “It’s full-on,” he explains enthusiastically. “When people come over they get in the booth and have their picture taken. I even have a book now, and anybody who comes by the house has their picture put in the book – even repairmen.”

Thornton, 52, shares his house with his girlfriend, the actress Connie Angland, and has no hard feelings about the break-up with Jolie, now dating Brad Pitt. “I never cheated on her. We had a great relationship. We loved each other the whole time we were together,” he says. “We just had different ideas about our lives. She has her thing where she’s all over the world and that’s great, I respect her for that. I just want to stay at home. I watch a lot of sports on television. I’m a big baseball freak. And if I’m not watching sports I’m watching kids’ programmes with my three-year-old daughter Bella.”

Jolie clearly feels the same: when Thornton received his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2004, she took out a full-page advertisement in Daily Variety, saying: “Billy, I love your brilliant mind . . . Congratulations! With love and respect always, Angie.”

Thornton is an unlikely star. Perhaps best known for his menacing Father Christmas in the 2003 black comedy Bad Santa he has chosen off-beat roles in films such as Monster’s Ball and The Man Who Wasn’t There since he first burst into the spotlight with Sling Blade 11 years ago. That film earned him a best screenplay Oscar. But if anyone was surprised by the success of a country boy it wasn’t Thornton.

Growing up in rural Arkansas he says he always knew he would be a performer. “My teachers hated me because I told them that I was never going to have a proper job, that I was going to be a musician or an actor. Whenever they insisted that I needed algebra and geometry, I said, ‘No, I don’t. Why do I need to know how to add letters like y and x?’ Then they’d say, ‘But what if you become a building engineer?’ to which I replied, ‘I promise you. I’m not gonna be’.”

Perhaps some of his quirkiness can be traced to his unconventional upbringing. “My family and childhood certainly formed who I am today. My mother had remarkable psychic powers and I learnt about solitude from spending time with my grandfather who was a forest ranger living out in a shack in the woods.

“I believe that traditional family values are great but I think you need to teach your kids to be artistic and creative, more than anything else.”

Today he claims to have sworn off marriage on the grounds that it “doesn’t work” for him. “I’ve been married five times and people think that’s some bizarre thing, yet I’ve got buddies who refuse to get married and have sex with 15 people a week. I’m like, ‘Which is better?’ At least I was trying.”

Thornton has revisited his early days for his latest film – Mr Woodcock – where he plays the eponymous, and sadistic, gym teacher. “At school I was a baseball player, a pretty darn good one. I even tried out with the Kansas City Royals before I got injured . . . but it was the gym teachers who were usually the worst – the bad ones.”

Outside school he says he had a childhood of running wild and mucking about with machinery. “The first thing I ever drove was a Ford tractor. I must have been five or six at the time. But the first car that was really mine was a 1966 El Camino and it was pretty cool. They don’t make cars like that any more.”

After leaving school his first job was shovelling asphalt for the Arkansas highways department. He enrolled briefly at Arkansas State University to study psychology but dropped out after two semesters and moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as an actor or musician (he is an accomplished drummer with his own band.)

The music never took off but he landed bit parts on television series including Knots Landing before Sling Blade, which told the story of a man released from psychiatric care after he murdered his mother and her lover as a child.

Today he is one of the most sought after actors in town, with upcoming films starring opposite Halle Berry and Kim Basinger.

“People who’ve seen some of my roles imagine I’m this crazy, yelling maniac in real life,” he says. “But outside of acting, I save my best performances for film executives.

“The best advice ever given to me was from Johnny Cash who told me, ‘No matter how much you nod your head and say oh yeah, that’s nice, at the end of the day always do it your way’.”

My stuff...

CD player
I’ve been listening to a lot of Mothers of Invention stuff from the mid1960s; a lot of British invasion stuff, plus Traffic and the Allman Brothers. I mostly listen to classic rock and old-fashioned country from the 1950s like Bob Luman

In my parking space
I have kids so I’ve got a Ford Explorer. But when they’re not with me, I drive my 67 Chevelle 396, right

On my DVD player
High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. I watch a lot of TV too

I will never throw away
My massage chair