\tBilly Bob Thornton is more than happy to play a foul-mouthed Santa (\u201cBad Santa\u201d) or a high school football coach (\u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d) or a NASA scientist (\u201cArmageddon\u201d), but one thing he won\u2019t do on the big screen is kill Tom Cruise. During an interview on The Playlist\u2019s \u201cBingeworthy\u201d podcast, the actor remembered turning down two big Hollywood villain roles: Green Goblin in Sam Raimi\u2019s \u201cSpider-Man\u201d and the arms dealer Owen Davian in \u201cMission: Impossible III.\u201d <\/p>\n
\t\u201cI don\u2019t have much interest in those kinds of roles,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cWith the Green Goblin, I didn\u2019t feel like getting up at 4am for five or six hours of makeup. And with \u2018Mission: Impossible III,\u2019 I didn\u2019t want to be the guy trying to kill\u00a0Tom Cruise. If you\u2019re the bad guy in a big movie like that, audiences remember it forever. I prefer to keep things looser and less predictable.\u201d \t<\/p>\n
\tWillem Dafoe famously took on the role of Green Goblin, while Philip Seymour Hoffman was cast to go head to head with Cruise in \u201cMission: Impossible 3.\u201d Both movies were box office successes, with Dafoe\u2019s turn as the Spider-Man villain being considered one of the most iconic turns in a comic book movie. Dafoe reprised the character in \u201cSpider-Man: No Way Home\u201d and has expressed interest in playing Green Goblin a third time. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \t\u201cIf everything was right, sure,\u201d Dafoe told\u00a0Inverse last year. \u201cI mean, that\u2019s a great role. I liked the fact that it\u2019s a double role both times. Twenty years ago, and fairly recently, both times [were] very different experiences, but I had a good time on both.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tDuring his press tour for \u201cSpider-Man: No Way Home,\u201d Dafoe said that his main stipulation for reprising the villain was that he not be a cameo appearance.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cI really didn\u2019t want to do a cameo,\u201d Dafoe told\u00a0The Mary Sue\u00a0at the time. \u201cI wanted to make sure there was something substantial enough to do that wasn\u2019t just a tip of the hat. And the other thing was, I said I really want there to be action \u2014 I want to take part in action scenes. Because that\u2019s really fun for me. It\u2019s the only way to root the character. Otherwise, it just becomes a series of memes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAs for Thornton, he currently headlines the Paramount+ original drama \u201cLandman.\u201d He has stayed away from Hollywood comic book movies for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Billy Bob Thornton is more than happy to play a foul-mouthed Santa (\u201cBad Santa\u201d) or a high school football coach (\u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d) or a NASA scientist (\u201cArmageddon\u201d), but one thing he won\u2019t do on the big screen is kill Tom Cruise. During an interview on The Playlist\u2019s \u201cBingeworthy\u201d podcast, the actor remembered turning down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}