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Billy Bob Thornton believes there’s a time and a place for celebrity activism.
During an appearance on the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast, the “Landman” actor, 70, explained why he’s never been one to use his Hollywood platform to force political or personal beliefs on others.
“I don’t know anything about politics,” Thornton said. “I have no idea. And the stuff that I do believe, I don’t want to force it down somebody else’s throat because I’m not an expert on that.”
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Billy Bob Thornton pushed back on celebrity activism in Hollywood. (Matei Horvath/Getty Images)
“I’m not really big on like at awards shows all of a sudden you start talking about saving the badgers and stuff. Like Ricky Gervais said, you know, it’s like get your little award and f— off, you know?”
This isn’t the first time Thornton has been vocal about his disdain for celebrity activism.
During an interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in November, Thornton shared he doesn’t really “care about awards anymore,” saying he’s “got plenty of them” and won most of them “under the wire, when awards were kind of real still.”
“I’ve won a couple recently,” he said. “But these days I just look at it as like, ‘Oh, OK, we’re gonna go over here and, you know, have some dry chicken breast and green beans, you know, and we’ll listen to people get up there and pontificate about how awesome they are.'”
Thornton said there’s a time and place to share your personal beliefs, and award shows are not one of them. (Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
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Thornton said “there’s a time and place for [activism]” and during award shows, “you should just stick to what it is.”
“Don’t go up there and talk about saving the badgers in Wisconsin or something, you know what I’m saying?” he said. “And people would argue and say, ‘Well, no, because I have a voice and because everybody knows me. This is a great platform for me to put this out there.'”
“Well, how about this? If you have a billion dollars, and you want to save the badgers, f—ing save them,” he added. “I mean, you got plenty of money to save the badgers, trust me. That is not, that’s barely gonna cut into your budget.”
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Last year, the actor opened up about the challenges he faced as a rising actor in Hollywood years ago.
Billy Bob Thornton thinks Hollywood is prejudiced toward people from southern states. (Getty Images)
While appearing alongside his “Landman” co-star Sam Elliott in a joint interview with Fox News Digital, the Arkansas native shared his view that there was a “certain prejudice” when he first arrived on the scene in Los Angeles.
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“It certainly makes you, at least for a period of time, stay in your wheelhouse,” Thornton said. “A guy from the Bronx can play a guy from Mississippi in the movies, I’ve found over the years. But a guy from Mississippi can’t really play a guy from the Bronx.”
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“There was a certain prejudice with southern actors for a long time,” he continued. “I don’t know, I actually did an audition once for a student film, and they told me I wasn’t southern enough.”
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Thornton has been open about his disdain for celebrity activism in the past. (Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Paramount+)
“It was about a guy from Alabama just off the turnip truck in California,” Thornton added. “And I said, ‘Well, I am just off the turnip truck from Arkansas.’ And it’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ And what they were looking for was that Foghorn Leghorn [accent], you know, the rooster on the cartoon. That’s the accent they were looking for, and I never really heard that. I grew up down there.”
Thornton later noted that while he initially struggled, he could later have his pick of roles after he rose to fame and established himself as a bankable actor.
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“Here’s what it is,” he said. “Once you’re successful, I could walk into Universal Studios and say, ‘I wanna play Bette Davis.’ And they go, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good idea.’ And then when I was coming up, I couldn’t get a part as a hillbilly.”
Fox News Digital’s Larry Fink and Ashley Hume contributed to this post.