• Sam Elliott, 81, stars as T.L. Norris in Landman season 2 alongside Billy Bob Thornton in the Taylor Sheridan series, and says audiences are gravitating toward the show as an antidote to modern stress — they want to “escape the ‘s—‘ in the world today”
• Elliott says his character’s physical decline and frailty feel “very true” to his own experience: “I’m just old and I’m still lucky to be working,” he told Variety — a line he delivered after reportedly being called “iconic” at a Directors Guild event
• Despite six decades in Hollywood, Elliott says he is still learning from his Landman costars, and frames the show’s appeal around character-driven storytelling and comfort entertainment rather than spectacle
• The Oscar-nominated actor reflected on one of season 2’s most emotionally resonant storylines involving aging and physical vulnerability, saying the material mirrors his own lived experience

Sam Elliott has never been one for self-congratulation, and that hasn’t changed in his ninth decade. The actor, 81, is in the middle of a late-career run that has introduced him to a new generation of fans through Landman — the Taylor Sheridan oil-patch drama that has become one of the most-watched shows on Paramount+ — and he has a theory about why the show connects the way it does.

“Escape” is his word for it. In an interview with Fox News, Elliott said fans are flocking to Landman to get away from the noise — to escape the “s—” in the world today. It’s not a complicated theory, but coming from Elliott, who has spent 60 years playing characters who don’t explain themselves much, it lands.

The show’s second season cast Elliott as T.L. Norris, a character whose age and physical decline are written into his bones. Elliott told Variety that the frailty feels personal. “What I feel like is that I’m just old and I’m still lucky to be working,” he said — a response, delivered without apparent irony, to people at a Directors Guild event who were describing him as “iconic.”

Still Learning

One of the things Elliott keeps coming back to in press for the season is how much he’s absorbed from his costars. Six decades into a career that spans Mask, Tombstone, The Big Lebowski, and an Oscar nomination for A Star Is Born, he says he’s still picking things up on set — a posture that fits neatly with both his reputation and the kind of grounded performance Landman requires from him, per People.

T.L. Norris is not a glamorous role. It asks Elliott to play vulnerability alongside Billy Bob Thornton, who anchors the series as roughneck fixer Tommy Norris. It’s working. The show has been renewed, the numbers are strong, and audiences, by Elliott’s read, are glad to have somewhere to land.

The post Sam Elliott, 81, Says ‘Landman’ Fans Are Tuning In to Escape the ‘S—‘ — and His Character’s Frailty Hits Close to Home appeared first on Cream.

• Billy Bob Thornton has type AB-negative blood, which affects fewer than 1% of people worldwide.
• The condition means fewer digestive enzymes and lifelong allergies to wheat, dairy, meat, and shellfish.
• Thornton opened up on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast, revealing a typical day of blueberries and gluten-free snacks.
• He discovered his blood type in 1980 and has described himself for years as “a vegan who cheats.”
• The Landman star, who turned 70 this year, also has a history of OCD, an eating disorder, and other health challenges.

Billy Bob Thornton has spent decades figuring out what his body will and won’t tolerate — and it turns out, the answer has been in his blood the whole time.

The Landman star, 70, opened up during a recent episode of the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast about the strict dietary life that comes with having type AB-negative blood, one of the rarest blood types on the planet. “I have type AB negative blood, which is the rarest type in the world,” Thornton told host Howie Mandel. “It’s like less than 1% of the population of the world has it.”

The condition, he explained, comes with a key biological catch: fewer digestive enzymes. That deficiency is the root of a lifetime of food sensitivities — allergies to wheat and dairy, a need to avoid shellfish, and a hard pass on pork and beef. Thornton discovered his blood type back in 1980, but the symptoms had been there his whole life. He just didn’t know what was causing them.

“When I was a kid, you know, I grew up in Arkansas and East Texas, and I ate everything,” he said. “I just assumed everybody felt like s— after they ate. I didn’t know.”

What a Typical Day Looks Like on the Billy Bob Thornton Diet

When Mandel asked what Thornton had actually eaten that day, the answer was pretty spartan: a bowl of blueberries and a decaf coffee. Looking ahead to later in the day, he was optimistic. “I’m going to have some gluten-free chips with some dairy-free cream cheese,” he said. “So I’m really looking forward to that.”

Working within those constraints takes creativity — and sometimes a willingness to improvise with whatever’s in the green room. Thornton recalled being at a Landman event where the spread was essentially off-limits: one tray of salami and prosciutto, another full of crackers he couldn’t touch. “Normally in these green rooms, they got a spread. I mean, you can usually find something, you know?”

Then he spotted a bowl of red and white grapes. And some spicy Dijon mustard. He took a chance.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, OK, so I’ll be bored as hell with this,'” he said of the grape. “And then I saw some spicy Dijon mustard and thought, ‘I wonder…'” The result? He called it “one of the best things I’ve ever had in my lifetime. So now it’s become a thing for me.”

Thornton has long described himself as “a vegan who cheats” — a label he put on himself during a 2020 appearance on the Mental Amanda podcast, where he admitted to occasionally breaking for salmon or halibut, or the pull of good Texas barbecue. The AB-negative blood type gives the phrase a whole new layer of meaning.

A Long History With His Health

This isn’t the first time Thornton has had to reckon with his body in a serious way. In 1998, while filming U Turn, he dropped 59 pounds — surviving largely on canned tuna and Twizzlers to look gaunt for the role — and developed an eating disorder. Two years later, he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles following a viral infection, which quickly became tabloid fodder with rumors flying that he’d had a heart attack or could only eat orange-colored foods.

He’s also been open about his OCD diagnosis, which he’s connected to a difficult childhood marked by abuse. In a 2004 interview with Ann Curry, he described the hypervigilance that defined his early years: “I would hear the car pull in the driveway around 4 o’clock usually, and I would, in my head, 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.” The constant mental calculation, he said, is emotionally and physically exhausting.

Now, at 70 — a milestone he’s spoken about with both pride and perspective — Thornton seems to have found a kind of peace with all of it. He’s talked about the unexpected gift of aging in Hollywood: the respect that comes with it, the wisdom people project onto you. “We’ve all seen each other get older,” he said, “and when I see that wisdom and see the respect that people have for them, it just kind of makes everything melt away somehow.”

Landman is set to begin filming its third season in August, which means more green rooms, more questionable spreads, and probably a lot more creative grape-and-mustard situations ahead.

The post Billy Bob Thornton’s Rare Blood Type Runs His Diet appeared first on Cream.

• Billy Bob Thornton said on Howie Mandel’s podcast that he doesn’t discuss politics because “I’m not an expert on that”
• The View hosts clashed over his comments, with Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin pushing back hard
• Alyssa Farah Griffin defended Thornton and turned the table by reminding co-hosts they once criticized George Clooney for his Biden op-ed
• Thornton, who describes himself as a “radical moderate,” has made similar comments on Joe Rogan and elsewhere
• The Landman star invoked Ricky Gervais’s famous awards show takedown: “Get your little award and f*** off”

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.

The post Billy Bob Thornton’s Politics Rant Sparks ‘The View’ Feud appeared first on Cream.

• Billy Bob Thornton appeared on Howie Mandel’s podcast and shared a hilariously gross OCD story from the late ’80s involving a stranger’s blackhead
• The 70-year-old Landman star has AB-negative blood — the rarest type in the world, shared by less than 1% of people — which forces a severely restricted diet
• Thornton and Mandel, both diagnosed with OCD, bonded over their shared condition in a conversation both called genuinely therapeutic
• Thornton’s unexpected food discovery: white grapes dipped in spicy Dijon mustard, which he now swears by

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.

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