Billy Bob Thornton has made it a tradition on all of his movies to perform one scene as Carl from Sling Blade. It usually ends up in the DVD extras. For Mr. Woodcock, Thornton could not even remember if he had continued the legacy.
Thornton on Mr. Woodcock
“I don't think they have it,” said Thornton. “I don't know if they have it on outtakes. I'm sure there's got to be one. Maybe I did, I don't remember. Honestly, I don't remember but I guess when they come out with the DVD, we'll see if I did it because they always put it on the DVD. I just can't remember if I did. I usually do. I've made it a tradition.”
Thornton plays the gym teacher of the title, a tyrant who terrorizes out of shape P.E. students. Perhaps it is Thornton’s revenge on all the teachers who irritated him. “I was tortured by all of them. They all hated me. I didn't have any teachers that liked me that I can remember, because I just told them that I wasn't ever going to be anything other than a musician or an actor and stuff. They told me I needed algebra, I needed geometry and stuff and I said, ‘No, I don't. I don't understand it. I don't get it. I don't know how to add letters.’ It's like y plus x, it doesn't make any sense. So they said, ‘What if you become a building engineer?’ I said, ‘I promise you, I'm not gonna be.’ And they just didn't like my attitude. My attitude was very much like it is still.”
Thornton as Mr. Woodcock
Mr. Woodcock
The actor was a good athlete, but that never made gym class fun. “I was a baseball player and I was a pretty darn good one actually. I actually had a tryout with the Kansas City Royals. Great baseball coach. Terrific baseball coach. The bad ones were usually gym teachers. I didn’t like to go to gym class because as an athlete you don’t like to go to gym class. It's sort of like sports light. You have a lot of people in there that can't really do anything anyway. You end up playing like dodgeball or some goofy game like that.”
He had to be athletic for the film too, because it included a scene where he wrestles Seann William Scott. “He broke my foot. I hurt his back. We rehearsed the stuff with these expert stunt guys and then we shot the scenes in a couple of days and it was pretty physical, actually. I mean it was funny sometimes but, that was the work part of it.”
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