So many losses at once took a toll on the actor. ''It starts making you think about your mortality,'' says Thornton, who has sworn off beer and taken up protein drinks. ''You start to get real nervous about things. I mean, doubling my nervousness,'' he says with a laugh while he lights up an American Spirit, ''is, like, ridiculous.''
But put Thornton in front of a camera and he experiences — and exudes — utter calm. ''I'm a wreck the rest of my life,'' he says, ''but when I play a character I honest to God disappear.'' That quality is understandably coveted by Thornton's directors. ''He's the best actor working today,'' says Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg. ''He is the only actor who truly transforms himself, and he doesn't do it just by a haircut or a different change of clothing. He changes himself so intensely from within, and it's effortless.'' Adds Harold Ramis, who directed the upcoming comedy Ice Harvest, which costars Thornton and John Cusack: ''He's not a deep Method actor. He just has great instincts, and can go any way.''
Thornton's role in Friday Night Lights didn't offer the actor his usual emotional escape. To play Coach Gaines, a taciturn man with the task of guiding a gritty Texas high school football team to a state championship, Thornton channeled his own father, also a high school coach. ''He was a bastard,'' Thornton says flatly. But ''I got to be him for a little while, you know, instead of me facing him. They always talk about things being therapeutic and all that kind of stuff, and that's such a boring f---ing drag, but it's true.''
Thornton has used his personal life just as powerfully as a storyteller, writing the scripts for Carl Franklin's One False Move (in which he also starred), The Gift (directed by Sam Raimi and based on Thornton's mother, Virginia, who is a psychic), and of course, Sling Blade, the movie that established Thornton as a fearsome talent. ''I'm absolutely proud of that movie,'' says Thornton, who adds of his performance, ''I'll stack up One False Move, Sling Blade, A Simple Plan, Monster's Ball, and The Man Who Wasn't There against anything.''
Sling Blade, which logged in at two hours and 14 minutes, would not only score with critics and audiences but garner Thornton advice from Martin Scorsese that would prove prescient. Remembers Thornton: ''He said, 'Don't cut a frame of it . . . This is the only chance you're going to ever have to make a movie the way you want to. Because once they know who you are, they are going to want to boss you around the rest of your life.'''
Only five years later, Thornton would swear off directing forever, thanks to the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses,starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. He battled with Miramax over the film's length (Thornton was asked to cut an hour-plus out of the original three-hour-and-45-minute running time). When he then felt that the studio punished him by undermarketing another of his hyphenate efforts, 2001's Daddy and Them (which costarred then girlfriend Laura Dern), Thornton decided he would never helm another movie.
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