Billy Bob Thornton said Landman never looked like a coast-to-coast or global smash from the start, even as the Paramount+ drama kept building an audience far beyond the audience he expected. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders TV panel for the series at the DGA Theater, Thornton said the show’s appeal was supposed to be simpler and smaller: “We thought it was going to appeal to the middle of the country, that was the hope for it.”
Thornton was there with Sam Elliott, Andy Garcia and director and executive producer Stephen Kay after a sold-out Stagecoach set with his band The Boxmasters the night before. By then, the numbers had already rewritten the story. The Season 2 finale drew 15.8 million viewers in its first two days in January and became the most-watched original series finale ever for Paramount+, a reach Thornton said no one on the cast saw coming. “We didn’t think the coasts would go for it — we certainly didn’t think it would become this huge international hit,” he said. “We have fans in Uganda, Australia and everywhere else.”
That surprise, Thornton said, came from the way Taylor Sheridan’s shows mix tone without losing the people inside them. “Taylor [Sheridan’s] shows normally will have a vibe, and this has several — emotion and humor and drama and absurdity and danger, all those different things,” he said. Elliott, who has spent decades on screen, framed the series more simply: “This show is a reflection of what we all would like to deal with from day to day.”
Thornton also talked about what it takes to play Tommy Norris, a part that leaned on his own life and his history with Elliott. “It’s easy to play father-son relationships when you’re a father, and when you had a father that you had a very tricky relationship with,” he said, adding, “I was just kind of putting on a nice pair of worn-in pants.” Of Elliott, he said, “Sam and I go way back, so it was easy.” Kay said that off-screen bond is part of what translates on-screen: “We love each other, and you can sort of feel it when you watch the show. There’s a whole lot of heart.”
The show now has a new run ahead of it. Season 3 was announced in December and is set to begin shooting in May, which means the question is no longer whether Landman can break out. Thornton answered that one in plain terms: it already has, and the audience reached well past the one the cast first imagined.
