Thornton: 'Bad things still to come'

The journalist before me comes out with a dazed expression. I go in. The setting - suite 331 of Park Lane's Metropolitan Hotel - seems strangely undramatic for its occupant. Billy Bob Thornton is sitting on the sofa.

The star of a thousand tabloid stories - chronicling the five marriages, the last to sex bomb Angelina Jolie (they bonded over a bridge where both considered suicide, and reportedly wore each other's blood in vials around their necks), the obsessive compulsive disorder, the phobias and the stupendous career writing, directing and starring in films such as Sling Blade, Pushing Tin, The Man Who Wasn't There and Monster's Ball --is 6ft, but seems smaller.

The 49-year-old is slight and fine-built. He is wearing a rose-sprigged shirt open to his navel, revealing grey whorls of chest hair. Black trousers hang over shiny, burgundy ankle-length winkle-pickers; silver-and-leather bracelets grip his wrists like handcuffs. His eyes, toffeecoloured and rheumy under thick black eyebrows, look out with a kind of understanding. He projects a delicate, wistful sadness.

I tell him he and Jolie seemed perfect for one another. He crinkles his eyes, throwing out bits of warmth. 'I mean, for everybody else it was very sudden,' he says in a low-energy, Southern voice. 'For us, we knew. So it wasn't as traumatic. She wants a different life from the one that I want. She's more of a traveller. I like to stay home.' So he couldn't face the travelling? 'That's not it. That's one of the elements of it, ya know.' Did he miss her? 'Sure. But not in some horrible way, because we see each other.' He pauses. 'Not often, because she's away a lot.'

Perhaps it was inevitable. Jolie, who starred in Tomb Raider, has talked about her sadomasochistic flings and habit of cutting herself. But Thornton signed a piece of paper in Jolie's blood, saying he could never leave her. The couple bought adjoining grave plots, ordered a fake electric chair and had tattoos of each other's names - though it seemed like a bad musical, they were obviously in love. And she was voted the world's sexiest woman. He giggles. 'I bet she laughs about that. Because when you know yourself... it's like when she used to see a movie poster with me on it. She'd be like, "That's not you!" I still love her. Some couples think if you split up you're not together forever, but we are together forever.' His eyes glaze with closed-off certainty. 'We knew that a long time ago. It was, like, sealed.'

He has moved on, though, if not in spirit: in September he had a baby called Bella with his girlfriend, a shy 39-year-old special effects producer named Connie Angland. They met on the set of his new movie, Bad Santa, where her sister was a make-up artist. 'She's very sweet,' he says faintly. Will he marry her? 'No. I'm not going to get married again. And she knows that.' He sighs. 'I don't know that I'm cut out for it.'

Bad Santa, a black comedy directed by Terry Zwigoff and executive-produced by the Coen brothers, is brilliant. Thornton plays Willie T. Stokes, a foul-mouthed safecracker forced to work as Santa Claus to pull off an inside job in a department store. He is saved by an unexpected attachment to a pudgy eight-year-old misfit. 'It's a hilarious script,' he remarks, looking cheerful. 'I've never seen a movie like it. Yet it's the same message as in all Christmas movies.

Which is, no matter what a loser you are and what you had growing up, through someone who reminds you of yourself, you can get a spirit of Christmas.'

Do his children (he has four) do the same for him? 'Definitely. They've given me whatever peace I have.' I tell him I've read of his phobia about antique furniture. 'Well, that's true.' And that he wears Jolie's blood around his neck. 'I don't see that as being strange!' he exclaims. 'I'm pretty regular, really. I don't eat orange food, I don't drink blood. I just pricked my finger and put a drop of blood on a locket for Angie, and she did the same for me.' So no vials of blood? 'No. As far as I know a vial is one of those things in a chemistry lab, I wouldn't wear that around my neck.'

He leans forward. 'Are you Irish? You have hazel eyes. And you're hair's a reddish blonde. That's an unusual combination.' Our eyes lock for an obscene length of time. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'I got distracted.'