Billy Bob Thornton: Billy, don't be a hero

Billy Bob Thornton, star of 'Sling Blade', 'Armageddon' and now 'Monster's Ball', is a strange fellow. He carries his wife's blood around in a phial, hates Komodo dragons and prefers plastic cutlery to metal. He's at his best playing outsiders, drifters and cruel racists – but are these characters anything like Thornton himself?

Just before I interview 46-year-old Billy Bob Thornton (fêted writer, actor, director; tolerated country n' blues man) I read a typical interview with his young actress wife, Angelina Jolie, in which she hyperventilates her way through a series of tributes to him. In passing, she notes that if Billy Bob were ever to betray her with another woman, she would "beat them both to death so quickly".

Thornton's latest film is Monster's Ball, a sweaty, interracial love story set in a smalltown Georgia of lonesome diners and rancid motels. At Thornton's very plush hotel suite, I'm greeted by his PA. Initially, she seems normal enough, grumbling about the fact that Thornton didn't win an Oscar for his performance (like his co-star, Halle Berry). Then she starts to describe one of her favourite movies, in which a scholarship kid gets to play the sport that he loves. Her eyes well up. She's so moved, she can barely speak.

To be honest, I can't wait for Thornton to add to this charged (some would say loopy) atmosphere. This is, after all, the man who wears his wife's blood round his neck, who claims that his mother can do magic, who has a thing about Komodo dragons and whose intense, Southern-fried demeanour is one of the most mesmerising sights in cinema today.

Suddenly he appears at the door. A shrivelled little fella with yellow skin, goofy teeth, an open-necked shirt and blue sunglasses, he looks like a down-at-heel mountebank from New Orleans. Either that, or the unhealthiest, sleaziest roadie ever. He invites me to sit down and offers me a chocolate sweet; "they're no-calorie" he confides, popping one into his mouth. Then he looks at the tape recorder and says, horrified, "is that thing on?".

This is a clue, though I don't realise it at the time. A clue that Billy has had a Change of Heart. Several questions in, he says with a sigh "You know what, I'm just a regular guy. I really am. The problem is these newspaper people and magazine folks who like to say weird things about you. They make sport about people's marriages and discuss if they're going to last. They just don't want people to be happy. It puzzles me, honest to God, because I don't wish anything bad on anybody and I've had some people do some pretty horrible shit to me."

He doesn't want to talk about this bad stuff ("I can't go into it"), so we sit in silence for a few seconds. I note, despairingly, that none of the chains round his neck contain anything remotely like blood.

Unlike Jolie, Thornton is not Hollywood royalty (her father is veteran actor Jon Voight). He's not even Arkansas royalty. He was brought up in poverty in Hot Springs, and messed around in bands, then he started drinking, and then got addicted to drugs. He broke into the movie-business late, leaving for LA in 1981 but only getting his break in 1992 (for some of those years, he literally starved; he once had to be hospitalised for malnutrition). But then he got to play a red-neck sociopath in Carl Franklin's celebrated One False Move and everything changed.

After that came Sling Blade, which Thornton directed, starred in and wrote. The screenplay went on to earn him an Oscar. In the film, Thornton plays a cretin bedevilled by the macho values of the South, who murders his way to redemption. It's a slice of gothic vérité to make you shiver in the sunlight, a portrait of madness that, like the breakdown scene in Robert Altman's Nashville, leaves you wondering about your own state of mind. There have been straight films since then (see Armageddon and Pushing Tin) and woefully straight directing turns (All The Pretty Horses). Dislocation, however, is what makes Thornton unfurl. He was terrifying in U-Turn (and greasier than fried-bread). More recently, there was the Coen brothers' existential noir, The Man Who Wasn't There, through which he drifted like a troubled man in a trance. It's not a perfect film, but he's perfect in it.

The feeling you get with Thornton is that the weirdness is for real. Which may or may not be explained by the fact that his on-screen neuroses are often exhibited "off-screen", too. In Sling Blade and last year's Bandits, Thornton's characters exhibit a fear of antique furniture. That's because Billy's creeped out by old stuff. The Man Who Wasn't There's Ed Crane becomes fixated with the electric chair; Billy's always wanted one, and took the film prop home. In Monster's Ball, his character loves chocolate ice-cream and hates metal spoons (preferring plastic); Billy, too. It transpires that he's also frightened of ferries.

His dealings with women seem no less strange. Jolie is his fifth wife, and they fell in love while Thornton was seeing actress Laura Dern, who only found out that they were no longer engaged when she read about his marriage to Jolie in a magazine. Journalists play a big part in Thornton's life. Angelina may gabble about their amazing love (and love life); he's been more confessional still. It's as if he wants to include everybody in his brave new world.

But that, clearly, is about to change.

Eventually, and trying to seem entirely uninterested in weirdness, I ask about his father, who he's said on a number of occasions was the model for his character – a racist, misogynistic prison guard called Hank – in Monster's Ball. Thornton, still hidden by his sunglasses, rumbles into life. "Yeah, my dad wouldn't have reacted very well if I'd brought a black girl home. He was sour and sad and depressed, full of rage and hate." Thornton thinks that his dad was jealous of all the attention he got as a kid. A big, slow smile: "My mother was fond of me." He describes his mother as "open, spiritual, supernatural". (The Gift, which Thornton wrote a few years ago, is dedicated to her.) His father was closed. "He was not very nice to me so – huh huh – I did all my activities outside the house. I was afraid of my dad."

Monster's Ball, like Thornton's own Sling Blade, is about how abuse gets passed on through the generations. Hank's father hates women, so does Hank. Hank's father makes Hank's life a misery; he, in turn, kicks down at his twentysomething son.

I ask Thornton if he thinks that he could have turned out like his father. He shakes his head. "I'm not the same kind of person. I was always a sensitive child. I always had a sense of wonder that I don't think he had. I have an innocence that's only been half taken away. I still believe in Santa Claus..."

Thornton has a 22-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Would he say that he's been a good father to her? He frowns. "Amanda? See, I never knew her much. I married her mom when I was just a kid in Arkansas..." He shifts around in his seat. "She's a sweet girl who I didn't grow up with, and I always felt a lot of guilt for that. I mean, I took care of her, monetarily..." There's a pause. "When I could. I mean, for years I couldn't..."

Clearly worried that this isn't sounding quite regular enough, he moves the conversation on to William (nine) and Harry (seven), the two sons from his fourth marriage. He says that he's "always been the father I wanted to be to them" and adds that he sees lots of them "now". Whose fault is it that he didn't see them before? "I don't want to get into all that," says Thornton quickly. "That's not fair to anyone." Belatedly, I remember that his fourth wife, an ex-Playboy model, accused him of "spousal abuse" during the divorce proceedings. So what changed? "Well," a nervous laugh, "my wife and my ex-wife like each other, they get along."

Gorgeous, caring Angelina – he jiggles whenever he mentions her name. But that defensive note in his voice isn't gone for long. Talking about how lucky he is to have her, he stumbles again over the fact that other people aren't over the moon for him. "But I'm not a wealthy movie star, I'm not someone who has it made. So no one needs to be jealous of me."

He talks about Jolie in the same way that he talks about his mother – the wonderful woman who loves him so much that it makes him the focus of ill-will.

There's some piece of logic missing, but I can't work out what it is. I wonder aloud what his mother was doing with his dad in the first place. Thornton's jaw comes jutting out. "Well, I've been with people before that I never liked, you know, particularly. People want to make a big deal out of things. But I used to do things 'cos they were there."

His blue sunglasses look more cold and impersonal than ever.

"Are you Irish?" he says suddenly. He takes off his sunglasses and proceeds to tell me that he's part Irish and that he loved Dublin, where he's just played some gigs with his band. This is his first big tour – he released an album, Private Radio, earlier in the year – and he says that the two weeks he's been away from Jolie have been "really hard". The couple have just adopted a Cambodian orphan baby, Maddox, and all three are going to "take off" for the summer. He's confident that they'll be together after that, too: "When I do a movie, she'll be with me, then she'll do a movie and I'm with her. The way we're gonna do it, we'll never be apart, and we'll both be with the child. All the time, see."

Maybe it's the arrival of the baby (and the messy court case involved in bringing him to America) which has made Thornton so wary. "We're just hoping we can get by with the minimum of, like, stupidity and gossip from the newspapers." He sighs. "They'll end up saying he's from another planet or whatever. I just hope they respect we're parents trying to lead a normal life."

It's the same mantra, but with his eyes out in the open Thornton seems like a new man. He talks about how his biggest regret is that he didn't pursue a career in baseball. "I was a pitcher at high school. I was being looked at by the Kansas City Royals, but I had my collar bone broken."

I say I can't imagine him on a sports field, and he laughs. "Baseball isn't like American football – baseball players aren't size dependent." He notes thoughtfully, "You know I was never a guy, and maybe that's because I was raised with women – you know, my mom had all these sisters... Maybe that's why I never subscribed to Playboy and all that crap. Never went to strip joints. I was an athlete, but not a guy."

He's absolutely right. Monster's Ball is in many ways a conventional – even soppy – story about how love can conquer all. It's Thornton's peculiar, male-female presence that gives it edge.

Time's up, and as he shakes my hand goodbye he says, "When is your birthday?". I tell him, and he looks thunderstruck. "You know my birthday is the day before that? And it's also the day of the baby's birthday. Although, actually," he frowns, "the baby was born on my birthday, if you work it out properly. When he was being born in Cambodia, it was 4 August in America."

For a second, I think "how narcissistic" and panic that he's trying to manipulate me into the fold. But his pleasure in the "uncanny" is impossible to resist. "See, what made me ask you that?" he wonders, goofy teeth all of a grin. Turning to the PR, he says, "Isn't that weird?"

Deborah Ross returns next week