Hollywood’s own Billy Bob Thornton, who has embarked on a music career with his band the Boxmasters, sat down on Wednesday for an interview with CBC Radio in Canada, and tried to get away with acting like he has never been in a movie. Odd, perhaps, for a man who was Oscar-nominated for best actor twice and won an Oscar for writing “Sling Blade.”

In the interview, which the public radio network has put online, host Jian Ghomeshi introduced Thornton’s band, in which Thornton plays the drums and sings, and talked about Thornton’s “other job” as an “Oscar-winning screenwriter, actor and director.” From there, it was all downhill as Thornton simply did not want to talk movies and seemed to take offense that he was anything but a musician, first and foremost.

Seeming to take a page from Joaquin Phoenix, Thornton gave his best spaced-out answer to a question about musical influences by talking about how as a kid he built plastic model monsters from a magazine.

When Ghomeshi prefaced another question with “given that you seem to be quite passionate about music,” Thornton asked the radio host if he would ask Tom Petty that question.

“Would I say that he’s passionate about music?” Ghomeshi said. “Yeah.”

“Really?” Thornton replied. “Would you explain that it’s not a hobby.” Ghomeshi seemed to be at a loss for words at the answer that, in itself, didn’t seem to make sense. So, he went on.

Thornton later injected a few expletives in a rant in which he told Ghomeshi that the host was “instructed” not to talk about him as an actor. “I’m not really instructed, you guys are here as a band, you’re performing,” Ghomeshi replied.

Thornton talked about growing up as a “music historian,” then later refused to join his bandmates in playing a song, on the excuse that he did not bring his drum set.     

Of course, the difference between Phoenix and Thornton is that the latter has actually released a few albums of music, whereas Phoenix retired from acting to pursue a career in rap but has convinced no one of his musical abilities.

Nevertheless, both actors have displayed a confused hostility during interviews that calls to mind some of the uncooperative, interview-as-performance-art conversations that major stars such as Bob Dylan have engaged in with journalists in the past. The difference is that, like Tom Petty, Dylan is a Grammy Award-winning musician and Thornton, so far, is not.

Billy Bob Thornton has worn a lot of creative hats over the years – actor, director, screenwriter, singer, songwriter and now drummer for The Boxmasters. He gained fame writing and directing 1996 movie “Sling Blade,” but if forced to prioritize his endeavors, Thornton, 52, said he would stick to acting and music. “And I think probably music has a slight edge on the acting,” he told Reuters in a recent interview. 
     
“(Of) the things that I don’t care as much about, the main thing would be directing,” he said. “I’ve only directed movies in self-defense, if I have a story that I really want to tell and I don’t know that I can get it across to another person to direct it, then I do it.”

“Screenwriting is probably the hardest thing to do,” he said. “It’s really not easy to write a good script, it takes lot of concentration and it’s a real solitary thing. I love the result of it. Like I can look at ‘Sling Blade’ and sit back and look at it, I’m very proud of it and I feel a great sense of accomplishment. But the process is very hard.” Thornton won an Oscar for that film’s screenplay.

Thornton is a bit of a music intellectual — his favorite artists include avant-garde rockers Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. In fact, he said he is ”phone friends” with Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) who has guarded his privacy since retiring from the music business in the early 1980s. “Very few people talk to him, and I got the opportunity to become friends with him over the phone,” Thornton said of the man who made the influential “Trout Mask Replica” album in 1969. 

Thornton’s celebrity status has allowed him to meet many of his music idols, but one artist he would love to meet is J.J. Cale — the Oklahoma-born rocker best known for writing “After Midnight” which Eric Clapton made a hit.

(Reporting and writing by Matthew Lewis)