What you see is what you get when you talk to Billy Bob Thornton. He is one of that rare species: an American actor who does not reek of the agency grooming process which ensures the blandest and most predictable of soundbite-driven interviews.
When we met at the Cannes Film Festival last month, he was at pains to put the record straight on the myths perpetuated about him in the media, and to express his joy at finding true love in marriage, the fifth time around, since he wed Angelina Jolie last year. He was anxious too to talk about his disillusionment with the movie business after the butchering of his film, All the Pretty Horses.
The couple's outspoken passion for each other, the circumstances of their marriage and the unorthodox ways in which they celebrate their relationship have made them into prime media fodder. Last year, when New York magazine conducted a round table of four prominent gossip columnists, three of them chose Jolie as the celebrity they most liked to gossip about - and they were unanimous that the marriage wouldn't last more than six months.
Like her husband, Jolie finds herself correcting stories such as those that she only eats orange food and that she played poker on their wedding day in Las Vegas and won $5,000. Then there is the story that they have an electric chair at home.
"We don't have it yet," Thornton explains in Cannes. "I've bought it already, but it's just a prop from one of my films, which I wanted as a keepsake from that movie, like the boots I kept from Pushing Tin. That's the true story, the full story. And yes, we do have a horse in the living room, but it's a big fibreglass horse with a saddle. And yes, we do have a velcro room. We don't have it yet, but they're building it, and I want it because we have these two little boys and they want to play and it will be fun. Put a little suit on them and they can jump on the wall and stick to it.
"So, yes, we actually do all this stuff, but when it's taken out of context or misperceived, it probably seems weird to people, but it's kind of normal. People think we're like nuts, but we're probably a lot more normal than a lot of other people. And at least we're honest about it.
"The fact of the matter is that I can't prove to you that we're going to stay together forever, but we are. If I see you again in five years' time, you will be able to say, 'How's everything going? How's your wife?', and I will say, 'Great'. The difference is that in the past I was never in the right spot."
Such was the case, too, with his professional life. "I didn't start acting very late in life, like a lot of people say," he says. "I became famous very late. I spent a lot of years being Guy Number Three on TV series like Matlock, that kind of stuff. I've been around a lot longer than most people think. All I know right now is that I'm truly not worried about becoming popular or making a lot of money or being a huge movie star. I'm positive of that now. For a while I wasn't sure, because I thought I had to keep up with everyone. I have no desire to have dolls made out of me."
Thornton, who will be 46 in August, grew up in a poor Arkansas family whose home lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. His mother, Virginia, is a psychic on whom he based the central character of his screenplay for the recent movie, The Gift, and she predicted that he would become famous and cross professional paths with his fellow southerner, Burt Reynolds. They did, eventually, when Thornton featured in several episodes of Reynolds's TV series, Evening Shade.
Having started out as a drummer in a rock band, Thornton went to Los Angeles in the late 1970s with his regular screenwriting partner, Tom Epperson. Times were so hard that Thornton lived on a diet of potatoes that led to a malnutrition-induced heart attack. He toiled for years in small roles in smaller movies - Babes Ahoy and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown were two of his 1989 credits - before finally breaking through after years in obscurity with the sharp screenplay he and Epperson wrote for the taut thriller, One False Move.
It starred Cynda Williams, the third of his five wives. He married his first wife, Melissa Lee Gatlin, with whom he had a daughter, when he was 20.
"I went bowling one night and ended up married," he says. "It was one of those deals".
Between his marriages to Gatlin and Williams, he wed actress Toni Lawrence, and after Williams, he went up the aisle with Pietra Dawn Cherniak, with whom he has two sons.
In 1996, Thornton finally realised his longtime ambition of directing and starring in Sling Blade, his thoughtful and unsettling moral drama of a mentally retarded man who, when he was 12, murdered his mother and her lover, and after 20 years in mental institutions is anxiously facing into the strange world outside. The low-budget picture became a major critical success and earned Thornton a screenwriting Oscar, and his riveting performance led to a string of roles in such notable movies as Primary Colors, A Simple Plan - and Pushing Tin, in which, before life imitated art, he and Angelina Jolie played husband and wife.
He then directed Daddy and Them, in which he starred with Laura Dern, to whom he got engaged. While she was away on another film in May last year, she learned that Thoronton and Jolie had married in Las Vegas. It was the second marriage for Jolie, the daughter of Jon Voight and the winner of an Oscar last year for Girl, Interrupted. Now 25, Jolie, like Thornton, first married at the age of 20 - when she wed her English co-star in Hackers, Jonny Lee Miller.
This time, Thornton says, he knows it's for real. "You know, when you finally get to where you're supposed to be, that's really great," he says. "You spend your whole life saying this is it and this is it and this is it, and when it really is it, you're like the boy who cried wolf. But this really is it, which is why every thing I say I mean it now.
"We exchange each other's blood all the time and for our anniversary she gave me a will with our grave plots next to each other, and next to my brother. That's pretty great, huh? And look at this. Look at this new tattoo I got done in New Orleans about three weeks ago." He rolls up his sleeve to reveal a red tattoo which reads "Angelina" and has four stars running down from it. "Angie is working in Vancouver at the moment," he says. "She was with me just last weekend when we had our anniversary. She came to Baton Rouge, where I have been working, and the kids came too, which was great. I hadn't seen the kids in six weeks, which is awful, because they are at school and I was away working six days a week."