THORNTON WON FREE ACTING CLASSES
BILLY BOB THORNTON managed to score free acting lessons when he moved to Hollywood after impressing his teacher by re-writing a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE play.
The star arrived in Los Angeles with just $500 (£330) in his pocket and decided to take an acting class, where he was told to memorise a monologue.
Thornton admits he was baffled by the assignment and decided to tackle Shakespeare’s classic Othello - by putting his own spin on the tragedy.
He tells Britain’s Total Film magazine, "I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I took something from Shakespeare and I rewrote it to be a contemporary thing? Hamlet, s**t, no, that’s too hard for me. How about Othello?’ So I read Othello in one night…
"The way I’d designed it, I play all the characters… I played Iago as a redneck from the South, Casio was like a full-on gay guy, Desdemona was this valley girl chick, Othello was this black guy like you’d see in the NFL.
"The people (in the acting class) were just sitting there, stunned. It was about 40 minutes." Thornton’s unusual performance wowed his teacher, who offered to mentor him for free.
He recalls, "After the class, the teacher pulls me aside and he says a couple of things. ‘First of all, just so you know from now on, monologues are three to five minutes… Second of all, I’ve never had anyone in my classes who I thought were more likely to go on to become hugely successful at this… You are going to win an Academy Award for doing this stuff some day.’ "I said, ‘Well, I’m broke. I sleep on my cousin’s pool table.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ This guy let me go to this class for almost a year without paying. And that’s exactly how I became an actor." Thornton went on to win an Oscar in 1996 for writing, directing and starring in Sling Blade.
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