Billy Bob Thornton takes mark for final season of ‘Goliath’
“Goliath” lawyer Billy McBride, a very troubled soul, is easily the one character Billy Bob Thornton has played the longest in a career that goes back 35 years.
“I’m predominantly a movie guy but I did do the first season of ‘Fargo.’ That was 10 episodes. So yeah, this was four seasons, 35 episodes or something, and the longest I’ve ever lived with a character.
“The good news — the character is so much like me that I just kind of had to roll out of bed and go there.”
This Friday the fourth and final “Goliath” season streams on Amazon Prime.
While this glove-fit of a role, a lawyer turned amateur detective, is called Billy, he’s not named for the actor. “The first script I read, the character was already called Billy McBride.”
This season finds Billy living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, far from his LA base. But is he in a better place than in 2016 when the series premiered?
“In some ways,” Thornton, 66, said in a Zoom interview while getting a neck and shoulder massage. “Just in the sense that he does want to explore who he is and where he wants to go. And he wants to kind of try to straighten his life out.
“In some ways he’s more confused than ever. There are a lot of conflicts going on within himself.”
As for the move to San Francisco, “It was probably good for him in a lot of ways. But (executive producer) Larry Trilling and I talked during Season Three about how we would love to shoot in San Francisco because it’s such a cinematic city.
“This season was going to have the look of a range from film noir of the ’40s and ’50s all the way to the Steve McQueen movies of the ’70s.
“Also, some of the ’50s and ’60s movies of Jimmy Stewart, like ‘Vertigo.’ That was the initial idea for this season. Not the story as much as it was the location; the story developed out of that.”
There’s a continuing trippy, hallucinatory feel to “Goliath” with, for instance, clips from Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning Western “High Noon.”
“You first see ‘High Noon’ on television and I’m watching it. But it’s a flashback in a weird, dreamier death sequence.
“I think in a lot of ways Billy McBride came behind me. You know? I mean, sometimes of his own doing. It’s a very symbolic moment in the show.”
And now it’s time to say good-bye.