Billy Bob Thornton’s Politics Rant Sparks ‘The View’ Feud

Billy Bob Thornton has never been one to lecture from a Hollywood stage, and he said so plainly on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast — and now The View is in full meltdown over it.

The Landman star, 70, told Mandel that he keeps his political opinions off the table because he simply doesn’t think he’s qualified to push them on anyone else. “I don’t know anything about politics,” Thornton said. “I have no idea. And the stuff that I believe about it, I don’t want to force it down somebody else’s throat ’cause I’m not an expert on that. What I am an expert on is having this shit” — meaning his own lived experience, his humanity. He and Mandel agreed that celebrities speaking to their personal truths is valuable; celebrities telling people who to vote for is something else entirely.

Thornton also reached for one of his favorite reference points on the subject: Ricky Gervais’s scorched-earth takedown of Hollywood self-importance. “I’m not really big on like at awards shows all of a sudden you start talking about saving the badgers and stuff,” he said. “Like Ricky Gervais said, you know, it’s like get your little award and f*** off.”

It’s not the first time he’s said it. Thornton made nearly identical remarks on The Joe Rogan Experience last November, where he admitted he doesn’t really care about awards anymore — he’s “got plenty of them” — and described modern ceremonies as occasions to “have some dry chicken breast and green beans” while people “pontificate about how awesome they are.” He’s also been consistent about his politics: he calls himself a “radical moderate” who doesn’t fit neatly into any party. His position isn’t that celebrities should be silent — it’s that they should put their money where their mouth is rather than just making speeches. “If you have a billion dollars and you want to save the badgers, f***ing save them,” he said on Rogan. “That is barely gonna cut into your budget.”

The View Table Splits Right Down the Middle

When the The View hosts took up the topic, the conversation went sideways fast. Joy Behar wasn’t having any of it. “Imagine bragging about how uninformed you are,” she said, her contempt barely disguised. Sunny Hostin backed her up with considerably more urgency: “We are at a crisis point in this country. I think democracy is participatory. I think when you have a platform, that means I have an outsized voice and when you have a platform, I think that you have a responsibility to speak up about what’s going on in this country and my view silence is complicity. We need every single ally to speak out.”

Whoopi Goldberg, notably, didn’t seem particularly bothered by what Thornton said.

Then Alyssa Farah Griffin stepped in — and things got interesting. “A, Billy Bob Thornton is one of my favorite actors. I’m never going to say a bad word about him, starting with that,” she said. “But B, a lot of this table criticized George Clooney when he wrote his Biden op-ed.” The reference landed like a grenade. Clooney’s 2024 New York Times piece urging President Biden to step aside from the race was not warmly received by everyone at that table — and Griffin wasn’t letting that go unmentioned. “That is a celebrity using his voice, saying what he believes,” she said. “It can’t just be when they agree with your position.”

Behar fired back: “He can say it and I can criticize it, that’s called free speech.”

Fair point — but Griffin kept going. She called out what she termed “slacktivism”: the habit of celebrities posting political statements, feeling righteous about it, and never doing the actual unglamorous work of civic engagement. “I don’t think we should bully people,” she said, “saying, ‘You have to speak out.’”

Sara Haines landed the quietest but maybe sharpest observation of the whole segment — that celebrities making big political declarations are mostly just firing up people who already agree with them while alienating everyone who doesn’t. Preaching to the choir, enraging the congregation.

More Than Just Politics

For what it’s worth, Thornton’s conversation with Mandel covered a lot more ground than Hollywood activism. The Oscar-winning Sling Blade writer-director-actor also opened up about his famously restrictive diet, which he said stems from having AB negative blood — the rarest blood type in the world, shared by less than one percent of the population. “It means you have less digestive enzymes,” he explained, which limits how his body processes dairy, wheat, shellfish, and certain meats. He grew up in Arkansas eating everything, he said, and just assumed feeling terrible after meals was universal. “I just assumed everybody felt like shit after they ate. I didn’t know.”

It’s a reminder that behind the Gervais quotes and the awards show takes, Thornton is genuinely one of the more self-aware people in the room — a guy who knows what he knows and, more pointedly, knows what he doesn’t. Whether that’s wisdom or a cop-out depends entirely on which side of The View table you’re sitting at.