Billy Bob Thornton is opening up about how he drew on his personal life when approaching his now-iconic role as Tommy Norris in Taylor Sheridan's hit TV series, Landman.

Thornton chats to Film Inside NYC about how he used the “difficult” relationship he had with his father, who passed away in 1974, to help colour his on-screen character. Tommy Norris has a strained dynamic with his father, T.L. Norris - played by Sam Elliott - and Thornton explains how he brought real-life context to the role.

Thornton reflects, “I had a very difficult relationship with my father, and kind of similar to the one in Landman with Sam. So I did draw on my relationship with my father in this”.

He goes on to show love to Sam and some of the other actors that he was influenced by early on in his career, “The guys that I sort of you know studied or tried to emulate were Sam and Bruce Dern and Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman - those guys”.

Thornton then pays tribute to how easy it is working with Elliot, and recalls crossing paths on another Sheridan production, the Yellowstone spin-off, 1883, “And so, Sam's always been a great influence and inspiration...I had two scenes with him in Tombstone, and then two scenes in 1883, but we've known each other very well over the years. And I'm very close to him, so when we do scenes together, they're very natural because it's just me and Sam talking to each other...I was with him last night and he's a wonderful man, and just a great inspiration to me”.

Thornton and Elliott begin Landman with a deeply fractured relationship, but over the course of the two seasons of the hit show so far, we see them gradually start to heal.

Thornton has been open in a number of interviews about how his father was abusive when he was growing up, sharing via AXS TV, “Physically, it was pretty hard. Emotionally, it was pretty hard”, before musing, “As a man, and it’s real hard to get across to people in the current society. We were raised in a place and time where you were told that you had to be the biggest, the strongest, the best, you had to be the fastest, you know? It was real easy to become a failure in the eyes of your father”.

He ultimately chose to forgive his father, “The thing about it that I learned, that I appreciate now…a lot of what he was trying to say was right. His values and the things he was trying to instill in me, he didn’t know how to do it and he did it in a horrible way, but guys of his time and area they weren’t real communicative people”.

In that same interview, Thornton gets candid about trying to understand where his father was coming from throughout his childhood, “What ended up happening was this frustration. I think he felt like a bigger man than he was. I think he felt trapped in a world that he knew he was better than, but he didn’t have the language for it, so it came out in other ways. I loved my father, and people think I’m insane for saying that. But I get him, I get him 100%. I have some of his problems”.

He stresses, though, that his advice to others in a similar situation would be: “I say get away from it, but don’t punish the person who has inflicted it upon you. Forgive them and leave”.

This honesty and grit that we see on-screen throughout Thornton's performance on Landman is a testament to how seriously he takes each role, with the Fargo star revered by many peers as one of the most talented actors in the modern era.

Landman is quickly establishing itself as one of the many hugely successful productions in the Sheridan universe, with a third season officially confirmed by Paramount.