Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

You better watch out, Santa Claus is coming to town. And he's drunk, angry and, on occasion, incontinent. Not to mention that he has very specific sexual preferences.

"Yeah, my Santa isn't exactly what you'd call kid-friendly," Billy Bob Thornton says of the department store Father Christmas he plays in the bad-tempered comedy "Bad Santa," which opened last month. "He's not anything friendly, really. He hates everybody, mostly himself. He's a sad, bitter case."

But a funny case, too, at least for those who can appreciate the humor in an alcoholic safecracker who teams up with an African-American dwarf every Yuletide to case a different department store for a Christmas Eve heist. Thornton certainly does.

"It was just one of those scripts that makes you laugh out loud when you read it," says Thornton. "Then I heard that Terry Zwigoff was attached to direct it, and I loved that movie `Crumb,' so I was pretty excited about getting the red suit on."

"Crumb" was Zwigoff's documentary about the cartoonist R. Crumb, a real-life character almost as misanthropic and messed up as Thornton's Willie T. Stokes is in "Bad Santa." After Thornton laughed his way through the "Bad Santa" script by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, he went back and watched Zwigoff's first feature, "Ghost World," and that pretty much sealed the deal.

"I really liked the way this guy could make you feel for some pretty odd characters. Plus, the truth is, I'm a pretty sentimental guy when it comes to Christmas, so I thought it could be fun to play a guy so different from myself," Thornton said.

For a lot of people, Thornton himself has always seemed like a pretty odd character, with his phobias, aw-shucks attitude and seemingly endless string of romances and marriages, the last being the highest-profile of all. He and Angelina Jolie had each other's names added to their catalogs of tattoos and famously wore vials of each other's blood as necklaces to symbolize a relationship that would last forever.

It didn't, but while Jolie has blamed Thornton for the breach, he has played the role of Southern gentleman.

"I've never talked about it, and I'm not going to," he says wearily. "I understand that people have this morbid fascination with things like that, but I'm not going to do anything to perpetuate that. I just tune out the static."

The static had "Bad Santa" carrying bad baggage, mostly because the film was originally set to be released last year. But Thornton says that was just wishful thinking on the part of the film's distributor, Dimension, a division of Miramax, because the movie was nowhere near to being finished in time.

"I mean, we could have released it in April, I guess, but that wouldn't have made much sense, would it?" said Thornton. "These stories get started and you can't really control them, but the fact is, all the test screenings of the film have gone great. People just crack up, because it's just so nasty, but in a good way, you know?

"People are shocked at the beginning, but by the time the movie is 10 minutes old, they're howling at it. We were laughing all the time we were making it, especially John, who plays the straight man. He loved that kind of humor."

John is the late John Ritter, Thornton's good friend and former co-star on the sitcom "Hearts Afire" and in Thornton's acclaimed first film as a director, "Sling Blade." "Bad Santa" is dedicated to Ritter, whom Thornton calls "a great actor and great human being."

"Bad Santa" was originally developed by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, for whom Thornton starred in one of his very best performances, "The Man Who Wasn't There." The Coens and Thornton hit it off — "we all have the same weird sense of humor," says Thornton — and after they left "Bad Santa" in Zwigoff's hands (the Coens remained on as executive producers), they tapped Thornton to play the Texas millionaire who is seemingly ensnared in the matrimonial web of gold digger Catherine Zeta-Jones in "Intolerable Cruelty."

Thornton followed that with a cameo as a pompous U.S. president in the current romantic comedy "Love Actually," which means that in some cities, he will have three films on screens at the same time. And he would have had a fourth had "The Alamo" not been pulled from the holiday release schedule at the last minute and moved back to April.

"That was the best decision they could have made, because `The Alamo' has the potential to be a great movie epic," Thornton says.

Playing one of his childhood heroes, Davy Crockett, Thornton was one of the few announced cast members to stay on the project when director Ron Howard left after failing to come to terms with distributor Disney over budget and ratings issue. (Howard thought the realistic violence would require an R-rating; Disney wanted a PG-13, which usually translates to a larger audience.)

"Ron stayed on as producer, and I was really happy when they picked John Lee Hancock to direct it, because I think he's the real deal as a director, and he's a really fine writer, too."

Hancock, who directed "The Rookie," rewrote much of the "Alamo" script, which had originated with John Sayles — who, to the consternation of the studio, had presented the story from the Mexican point of view as well as that of the Texans. It was later reworked by Leslie Bohem (who wrote the recent Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries "Taken") and then Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for "Traffic."

"I think everyone's going to be pleased with what John's done. It's still a serious, complex story, and just to get it out there in time for Oscar nominations without making it as good as it could be wouldn't have done the film justice," Thornton says. "Besides, we need to quit bunching up all the really good movies at the end of the year. Nobody has time to see them all."

Thornton included. He's spending his holidays with his two sons, Willie, 10, and Harry, 9, and their mother, his fourth ex-wife, Pietra Cherniak.

"We'll have a good dinner and open presents and probably watch `It's A Wonderful Life' for the hundredth time. I think they'll have to wait a few years for `Bad Santa,' but when they're old enough, it'll probably be some kind of cult film or something. At least, I hope it is."

(c) 2003, Detroit Free Press. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.