Billy Bob Thornton has a child's heart, a truck-driver's mouth and a William Faulkner brain. His pal Robert Duval has dubbed him the hillbilly Orson Wells, but he could have just as easily called him the Socrates of the South. He is far more philosophical and complex than he lets on. That famous, which smile burns about as hot and long as a flashcube, does not appear to come from happiness. Still, it seems authentic enough—maybe something he learned as a kid to get out of washing the dishes. I don't think that it's a shield used to deflect people looking too closely—he doesn't seem to be hiding anything behind those teeth—he lays his pain right there in the spotlight, next to his celebrity.

At first glance he's a charming open book of a quirky chain smoker, equal parts cool, smart and strange. It would be easy to underestimate him, lean lazily on the good ole' boy tag, and recycle variations of the headline he detests: Beverly Hills-Billy.

Like many of you, I am acquainted with the essential Billy Bob video collection: The Man Who Wasn't There, Monster's Ball, Sling Blade, a Simple Plan, Pushing Tin, Bandits, Bad Santa. But are these merely lines that he reads or lives that he's lived? The pain of Ed Crane, Jacob Mitchell, Russell Bell, Karl Childers, Hank Grotowski and even Bad Santa seem to have been born in Thornton's big broken heart.

These men wander onto the screen like a blind man tapping a cane on a freeway off ramp. Salvation rests on a razor's edge as they feel their way out of pitch-blackness, not into perfect light, but a hazy dimly lit dusk where things are slightly better than okay. It's as if Billy Bob can't conceive of a heaven without something broken in it. The conclusion of Monster's Ball finds him seated in a forgotten and flawed paradise, on a creaky wooden porch with a beautiful woman, saying, "We're going to be all right." In spite of long odds, he always has been.

Billy Bob Thornton enters a suite at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. He is dressed all in black, and is no more pompous than you would expect his gardener to be, making eye contact with each of us, greeting us separately and sincerely. "I used to live here," he says, smiling. He lights a smoke like a torch of liberty, a small victory against a world intent upon snuffing out our freedom to destroy ourselves.

Every guy wants to hang with Billy Bob, to play cards, or pool, or three-flies up, knock back a few long necks with him and maybe discuss the finer points of Captain Beefheart, rock instrumental music or Tommy Boy. So, it is perhaps surprising that his biggest real-life fans are women, especially hurt women who want to pull him under the covers and make it all better. But there's something else, many something elses. Here is Sling Blade's Karl Childers, all hunkered down with misunderstood good intentions, a savant whiz kid who can "fix anything" except for the cursed side of the blessing that is his life, than conducting an interview. It's like the loneliness in the best of country music, his peddle steel voice alternating between longing and hope. To say he is nice, or mean, foolish or wise is an insult to his complexity and to everyone with sensitive hearts and minds and souls who attempt to float above the garbage of earth.

Billy Bob Thornton is a movie star and a Hollywood legend. But he had an opportunity offered to one in millions—to transcend even those lofty heights, to become James Dean pulled unscathed from the wreckage of Little Bastard, JD Salinger exiled to Margaritaville. I mean, what if he would have bailed after the release of Sling Blade? There would be an occasional sighting in Barbados or some distant place, playing dive bars for drinks and tips. But you can't really blame him for doing the next best thing: Attracting fortune, fame and more than his share of gorgeous women. Happiness? Now that's quite another story.

Risen Magazine: On a scale of one to 10, how neurotic are you?

BBT: [Laughter] I think that there are different degrees of insanity—there's the artistic insanity, there's the Republican insanity, [Laughter] I think that everybody's born with something. But I'm not sure that 10's enough; [Laughter] I think I go to 11.

RM: What events have shaped your life?

BBT: My father was a high school basketball coach. He wanted me to play sports, and I was the local high school baseball hero. That wasn't really quite good enough for him because he wanted me to be a football player. I said, "Look, I'm gonna' get killed out there, that isn't what I do." So I did that, and my mother encouraged me to play music. I had a band from the time I was a little kid, and that's really what I thought I was gonna' do. I didn't have any success at it except for in the last few years.

I had this drama teacher in high school. Her name was Mollie Treadway. I was, maybe, 20 and when she died I was a pallbearer at her funeral. She used to see me writing short stories in class and doing all sorts of creative things like that. She said, "We're gonna' let you run the class sometimes," which she'd never done before. So, she let me run my own plays and direct them and cast the people from the class. That was my first directing experience, when I was a senior in high school. She was the only teacher that ever encouraged me, and I think that it's because of her that I got into acting.

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