Billy Bob Thornton’s Wild OCD Story and the Diet That Changed Everything

Billy Bob Thornton has never been one to shy away from the weird, the raw, or the real — and his recent appearance on Howie Mandel Does Stuff was no exception. The 70-year-old Landman star sat down with Mandel and his daughter and co-host Jackelyn Shultz and delivered one of the more memorable podcast conversations you’ll hear this year: part gross-out story, part genuine mental health reckoning, part accidental food revelation.

The highlight — if you can call it that — was a story from the late ’80s that Thornton himself introduced with a fair warning. “You wanna hear a funny, but creepy, gross funny one?” he asked, before launching into it.

He was standing in line at the market pavilions in West Hollywood behind an older man with a “leathery, wrinkly neck” covered in blackheads. One in particular was enormous — the size of a pin head, Thornton said. And then the OCD kicked in. Not a desire to pop it, exactly. Something harder to explain. “You’re saying you want to touch it?” Mandel asked. Thornton clarified: he didn’t want to. He had to. His brain simply wouldn’t let it go.

So he used a nearby magazine rack as cover. He reached over, made contact — “I went ‘boink’” — and grabbed a copy of People magazine to play it off. When the man turned around, Thornton apologized, said he was just grabbing a read. Crisis averted. Compulsion satisfied. “So anyway, I got to touch the blackhead and get out of it, you know.”

Mandel and Shultz lost it. “Did you say boink?” Shultz asked through laughter. “That’s hysterical,” Mandel added. Thornton, deadpan: “I got over that a long time ago. I went to blackhead therapy.”

The Exhausting Reality of Living With OCD

The laughter was real, but so was the weight behind the story. Thornton first shared his OCD diagnosis publicly in a 2004 interview with Ann Curry, where he connected the condition to a physically and emotionally abusive upbringing. His symptoms showed up early. As a child in Arkansas, he’d count silently in his head while waiting for his father’s car to pull into the driveway around 4 p.m. “I would say if I can count to a hundred five times before I hear the car come in the driveway, everything’s going to be okay,” he told Mandel. He knew it was irrational. He couldn’t stop anyway.

“It exhausts you,” he told Ann Curry back then. “You’re constantly doing mathematics in your head.” Twenty-plus years later, sitting across from Mandel, the sentiment hadn’t changed. “It’s so emotionally and mentally exhausting that that’s one of the things that people don’t really say much,” he said.

Mandel knows that exhaustion intimately. His own OCD — he’s a well-known germophobe who famously won’t shake hands — became public in an unplanned way during a 1998 appearance on The Howard Stern Show. When he couldn’t get out of the studio because he didn’t want to touch the doorknob, the crew thought it was a bit and playfully blocked him. It wasn’t a bit. His panic attack was real, and in the moment he told Stern he saw a psychiatrist for OCD — not realizing the show was still live.

What brought the two together before this podcast was Thornton reaching out directly. Mandel revealed that Thornton had contacted him, noting they had a lot in common. “It was beautiful to be open with somebody about humanity and about struggling,” Mandel said. Later in the conversation, Thornton circled back to that — noting how rare it was to connect with someone in the industry who wasn’t just talking about projects and deals. They both agreed: talking about the condition itself felt like actual relief.

The Blood Type That Changed How He Eats

The health conversation didn’t stop at OCD. Thornton also opened up about the dietary restrictions that have shaped — and complicated — his life for decades. He has AB-negative blood, the rarest blood type in the world according to the American Red Cross, found in less than 1% of the global population. Along with that comes fewer digestive enzymes, which means his body struggles to process a long list of foods he grew up eating without a second thought.

“I’m allergic to wheat, dairy… can’t eat meat, like, you know, pork or beef or any of that stuff,” he said. No shellfish either. The list is long. For breakfast the day of the podcast, he’d had a bowl of blueberries. His post-show plan: gluten-free chips with dairy-free cream cheese.

The thing is, he didn’t always know something was wrong. Growing up in Arkansas and East Texas, he just ate everything — and felt terrible after every meal. “I just assumed everybody felt like s— after they ate. I didn’t know,” he said. He laughed about it, but there’s something genuinely striking about spending years of your life thinking misery after a meal was just… normal.

Mandel brought up a detail that got a good reaction: his son Alex, who is friends with Thornton’s son William, once came home and reported that Thornton had served him bagels with cream cheese and ketchup. Thornton didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a hillbilly bagel,” he said.

And then there’s the grape thing. Thornton was in a green room before a Landman Q&A event, staring at a spread of deli meats, cheeses, and crackers — essentially everything he can’t eat. The only safe option was a bowl of grapes. Resigned to a boring snack, he spotted some spicy Dijon mustard nearby and made an impulsive decision. He dipped a white grape in it and took a bite.

“It was one of the best things I ever had in my lifetime,” he said. “So now it’s become a thing for me.”

Thornton is currently starring in Landman on Paramount+ alongside Ali Larter, Demi Moore, and Sam Elliott — a show that’s already been renewed for a third season. But for one afternoon on a podcast, none of that was the point. The point was blackheads, blood types, and the particular relief of finding someone who gets it.