Tommy Lee Jones Is Not Acting
In both life and the roles he’s played, he’s been described as difficult, ornery, curt, and contentious. And while meeting to discuss his latest—and some say greatest—movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the Texas film legend more than lives up to his billing.
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“I have to admit, I’ve never been around anyone like him,” I later said to one of Jones’s close friends, Bill Wittliff, the Austin-based film producer and screenplay writer who cast Jones as the taciturn, hard-edged Woodrow Call in the famous 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove.
Wittliff chuckled. “But isn’t that precisely why he’s so appealing? Yes, Tommy Lee’s personality can be very hard, very rough. He has an intensity that’s all his own. But it’s an intensity that very few actors can come close to matching. You watch other actors on-screen, and you know they are having to invent their intensity. Tommy Lee does not. That’s just who he is. Believe me, you only need to be around him a couple of minutes to realize he’s not acting.”
IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, Jones has bewildered just about everyone who has met him. Born in San Saba in 1946, he was an only child, the son of Clyde Jones, a former ranch hand turned oil-field roughneck, and his wife, Marie, who had been raised on ranches north of Abilene. For several years, Clyde regularly moved the family from one West Texas oil town to another, eventually ending up in Midland, where the young Tommy Lee developed a reputation as a tough, hardscrabble kid who loved to play football. He seemed destined to live a blue-collar life like his father; he even spent one summer in his early teenage years working on a garbage truck.
But he also displayed enormous academic promise, and in the early sixties, at the same time his father was offered a higher-paying job to work for a major petroleum company in the oil fields of Libya, Tommy Lee, who wanted to stay in Texas, received a scholarship to attend St. Mark’s, the elite all-boys prep school in Dallas. There, he played on the football and soccer teams. After watching a group of boys rehearsing Mister Roberts in the school’s theater department, he began to try out for plays, at one point getting the role of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.
“I’m not sure there had ever been a student at St. Mark’s like Tommy,” said William Clarkson, who was also a St. Mark’s student in those years (from Corsicana) and who shared a bedroom with Jones and two other boys at a teacher’s home not far from the school. “He was a moody, brooding, extraordinarily volatile teenager. He could laugh uncontrollably, but you also thought it was a kind of dangerous laugh. And if you said something he didn’t appreciate, there would be this almost scary sudden shift in personality in the way he related to you.
“And yet,” added Clarkson, who is now an Episcopal priest and the president of the respected Westminster Schools in Atlanta, “there were moments when you would see this genuine sensitivity in him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. I remember he would lay in his bed and write poetry about a girlfriend he had back then—this poignant, mooning, painful adolescent poetry. Sometimes he’d force us to sit there while he read the poetry out loud. Of course, we didn’t dare laugh at him about it. We were scared what he’d do to us if he saw us laughing. I’m not kidding. He could scare the hell out of us.”
After graduating from St. Mark’s, Jones was accepted at Harvard, where he roomed with Al Gore and was an offensive guard on Harvard’s football team, playing in the famous Harvard-Yale game of 1968 that ended in a 29—29 tie. He wrote his senior thesis on Flannery O’Connor, the Southern short-story writer, and in his spare time he performed Shakespeare, Brecht, and Pinter in university plays.
Compared with Harvard’s other theater students, one of whom was the pencil-thin John Lithgow, Jones was stunningly good-looking, raw, rugged, and masculine—a real Texan in Cambridge. He decided to continue acting after he received his English degree. He spent a few years doing theater in New York and then was hired to play Dr. Mark Toland on the soap opera One Life to Live. He wasn’t the typical leading man, but there was no question he was headed for stardom. Directors loved his dark, dangerous face and that hint of malevolence he could put in his voice. They also loved the way he revealed a character’s softness, never displaying an iota of sentimentality. In his first major movie role, he played a menacing sociopath in Jackson County Jail. He then played a violent Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder, a daredevil race car driver in The Betsy, and a homicidal police detective in The Eyes of Laura Mars. (Strangely, he passed on playing the villainous bull rider in Urban Cowboy.) He got rave reviews for his portrayal of Loretta Lynn’s cocky young hillbilly husband in 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter. He won an Emmy Award for his performance as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song and was nominated for the role of Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove. He received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of imperious New Orleans homosexual businessman Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and, of course, he won the Oscar in 1993 for best supporting actor in The Fugitive.
However, just like the St. Mark’s boys, the Hollywood crowd was often unnerved by his volatility. He was apparently a big drinker (“His drinking scared me,” his first wife, the actress Kate Lardner, wrote in her autobiography), and he did not hesitate to confront anyone on movie sets who rubbed him the wrong way. During the filming of one movie, he reportedly got in a scuffle with a screenwriter, and on the set of Batman Forever, he is said to have been so disgusted with co-star Jim Carrey’s goofy personality that he refused to sit at the same table with him during lunch breaks. At the end of the filming, the movie’s director, Joel Schumacher, called Jones “a bully,” an astonishing public put-down from one A-list Hollywood figure to another.
Another A-list Hollywood director, Barry Sonnenfeld, once told Newsweek that after watching Jones do one of his typically combative interviews on television, he turned to his wife and said, “Thank God, as long as I live, I will never, ever have to work with that jerk.” But then he found himself signing on as director for the comedy Men in Black, with Jones and Will Smith in the lead roles. Not only did Jones complain about where his marks were, he also fired off a blistering six-page critique of the script (he reportedly claimed that he had written better stories in grade school). During one shoot, at three o’clock in the morning, he walked up to Sonnenfeld and growled, “You know, if you were smart, you wouldn’t say any of this,” crossing out a chunk of dialogue.
After filming was over, one of the film’s producers said Jones “is like the original cactus.” Yet no one suggested his hiring had been a mistake. Despite the tension, Men in Black became a monster hit, earning more than $200 million at the box office in 1997, in large part because of Jones’s hilariously gruff performance as the world-weary, seen-it-all secret agent.
PREDICTABLY, JONES CARED little about discussing his career with me. When I asked what had been the most difficult role for him to master, he said in his dismissive manner, “I don’t know.” When I asked him what had been his favorite role, he said, just as dismissively, “The one that paid me the most money.”
But he did tell me that the year that Men in Black was released, he learned that a boy named Ezequiel Hernandez Jr., who lived not far from a ranch Jones owned in far West Texas, near the Texas-Mexico border, had been shot to death by a camouflaged Marine who had been sent to that part of the state to look for drug smugglers (see “Soldiers of Misfortune,” August 1997). It was said to be the first killing of an American citizen on American soil by a U.S. soldier since the shootings at Kent State University, in 1970. The Marine claimed he had shot the boy in self-defense, and he was not prosecuted. “Anyone knows that if the kid had been killed in Dallas and his name was Bobby Johnson and his skin was white, it would have been a different story,” Jones said.
For the first time, there wasn’t the usual tone of disgust in his voice at having to answer humdrum questions from a reporter, but a genuine anger. “I decided it was time to make a movie about a part of the world that many people haven’t experienced or don’t understand,” he said. “I wanted to give people a glimpse of a world that has its own character, its own quality, its own struggles and disappointments, its own harshness, as well as its own beauty. I wanted to portray the social and cultural contrasts between the land that’s south of the Rio Grande River and the land that’s north of it, and in the process, I wanted to show how things are different on each side of the river and how they are surprisingly the same.”
He paused. “I wanted to make a movie about my home country,” he said, “my home people.”
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