Bad Santa 2 lands on screens this holiday weekend and for those of us who hold the first film so dear, this is a welcome return of Billy Bob Thornton’s misguided Willie and his short-tempered friend Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox). It wouldn’t be a Bad Santa flick if “the kid” from the first film wasn’t there, too. Well, good news for Bad Santa fans, Bad Santa 2 not only reunites Thornton and Cox, but also the scene-stealer from the 2003 film, Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly… all grown up!).
If the above-mentioned reunion isn’t enough to put fans in the seats for the follow-up that is 13 years in the making, how about the fact that Oscar-winner Kathy Bates is on board to play Willie’s cantankerous mother, Sunny?
At the press day for Bad Santa 2, The Movie Mensch caught up with stars Thornton and Bates to talk about their combustible comic chemistry, what each most admires about the other as well as why they believe audiences have so connected with a man who isn’t the most redeemable character in the universe… Bad Santa.
Q: Why do you think you two click so brilliantly in Bad Santa 2?
Billy Bob Thornton: You can’t manufacture chemistry, that’s for sure. It’s gotta be there. Kathy’s from Memphis and I’m from across the river in Arkansas and so we had not only similar backgrounds, in a lot of ways, but also we’ve had parallel careers. We didn’t become movie stars because we were Calvin Klein models [laughs]. We both became movie stars of our types by playing characters. We have an understanding of how when you play a character you can’t play it 70 percent of the way. If you’re gonna do something, you’re gonna do it all the way. If you’re playing Pat Boone, you gotta play Pat Boone. You can’t say, “Can I be a little more edgy?” No, you gotta play Pat Boone. If you’re playing Charles Manson, you can’t say, “Well, I don’t wanna look bad.” You gotta look bad. When you’re an actor, the way Kathy and I came up, we’re taught that by the people that we revered.
Q: Kathy, is it hard to play a character that is so not the most upstanding?
Kathy Bates: I realized, you can’t be so screwed up, and so in something, that it’s just invading. I learned this hard lesson… that as much as I really want to be just that character, and not feel any part of myself, that I have to be professional. It’s like being an opera singer. You can’t cry and sing at the same time. I had to be professional and leave it at home — on the stage home — which was home for me. In some of the roles that I played recently, like in American Horror Story, if I’m doing something really horrendous, I actually go through a ritual when I take my costume and my makeup off. I visualize removing all of that negative energy from myself, and I find that really helps — it’s not me, it’s somebody else. I’m not that person who would make those choices or say those things.
Billy Bob Thornton: It’s funny because she’s one of the sweetest women in the world, and for some reason because she plays the kinds of characters like I’ve played, sometimes when people meet the both of us, they say things like, “Oh, you’re so nice!” It’s shocking, people like hide around the corner. It’s very easy to fall in with Kathy. What a good actor should do is whatever that person is. That’s what you gotta be. So in real life people are hyperactive, they’re loud, sometimes they’re quiet, whatever it is. That’s your actual job as an actor. You take whatever character that is, in whatever situation it is, and you make those moments real. You don’t develop some kind of style.
Q: When this project first started going, Sunny was supposed to be a man. Why was it changed?
Billy Bob Thornton: We were trying to crack this idea of having the father. The problem with having the father was that you kinda had two Willies. If you had another man playing my father doing what I’m doing, then it just made it too close. Somebody said, “Hey, what if it’s the mother?” And then all of us said, “That’s brilliant.” The original idea was to have a Jack Nicholson or Bruce Dern — someone like that. It would have been good, but story-wise it just seems like the same character just playing off each other, just slightly older than the other.
Q: Kathy, were you in from the get-go?
Kathy Bates: When they said, “Wanna play Billy Bob’s mother?” I said, “Where do I sign?” What can I say, I loved playing a biker chick. I always wanted to ride a motorcycle, and have tats and a Mohawk and do all of these crazy things. We’re actors. We love to play all kinds of different parts. The main thing for me was being a fan of the first movie.
Q: How did having Willie’s mom there provide further insight into the Bad Santa character that maybe you didn’t have before?
Billy Bob Thornton: When you see where he came from, you kind of understand more why he is the way he is. He grew up being who she’d sell out to do stuff for her all the time — grifters in a way. You can see the mother-son relationship.
Q: How do you see Sunny and why she does what she does?
Kathy Bates: I see her as somebody who doesn’t trust anybody on the face of the Earth. Someone who’s come from a rough background, not unlike the one she inflicted on her son. There’s a moment where, I think, her maternal instincts are stirred. She feels the warmth of the moments like when she chewed up the caramels for him as a baby. She’s selfish. She’s a coward. I don’t think she thinks she’s an alcoholic. But, she likes the breakfast of champions. She’s the kind of woman who will drink you under the table.