Tommy Norris is a landman — an occupation specific to the oil industry with no clean analogue elsewhere. He leases mineral rights from landowners, negotiates drilling agreements, manages crises that erupt in the field, and serves as the indispensable intermediary between the company’s executive ambitions and the physical reality of the Permian Basin. He operates in the gap between capital and land, between the boardroom and the drill floor, between what the law allows and what the situation demands.

He is divorced, imperfect as a father, and expert at his job in ways that can’t easily be dramatised because they are mostly a matter of knowing what to say in a room full of people who don’t want to hear it. He has no official title that captures what he actually does. His authority is entirely informal and entirely real.

Sheridan wrote the role directly for Thornton. The match is precise: the role demands an actor who can project authority without charisma and competence without heroism. Tommy knows things most people in the room don’t, and he’s too tired and too honest to pretend otherwise. Thornton has been the right actor for exactly this kind of part across four decades of work. Landman crystallises it most completely.

Billy Bob Thornton spent his twenties and early thirties as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, taking whatever television work he could find while writing screenplays on the side. The pivot came gradually, then all at once: Sling Blade (1996), which he wrote, directed, and starred in, transformed him from a supporting player into one of the most distinctive voices in American film. He played Karl Childress, a mentally disabled man released from a psychiatric hospital after 25 years, with a specificity and empathy that made the performance impossible to categorise or dismiss. The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay followed, along with a nomination for Best Actor that many felt should have been a win.

What followed was one of the more varied runs of any actor of his generation. He worked with the Coen Brothers (The Man Who Wasn’t There), Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan), Mike Judge (Idiocracy), and appeared in massive commercial films (Armageddon, Eagle Eye) without losing the eccentricity that made him interesting. His performance in Bad Santa (2003) as a degenerate mall Santa is one of the funniest and most committed pieces of work in American film comedy. He got a second act in prestige television with Fargo Season 1 (2014), playing Lorne Malvo — a character of cold, almost philosophical violence — in a performance that drew Emmy recognition. Goliath (Amazon, 2016–2021), in which he played a washed-up lawyer finding his way back, demonstrated his ability to carry a series across multiple seasons.

Thornton is also a musician — he fronts The Boxmasters, a country-rock band — and has spoken extensively about his various phobias and psychological peculiarities in terms that make him seem less like a Hollywood actor than a genuine eccentric who happens to have found a career in performance. The authenticity of that personal oddness is what makes him so convincing in roles that require a character who doesn’t quite fit the world he inhabits.