How Billy Bob Thornton’s Last Minute Cameo in 1883 Turned Into a Lead Role in Taylor Sheridan’s Landman

Billy Bob Thornton’s willingness to hop on a flight led to a role of a lifetime.

During a Q&A session at a Landman screening in Nashville, Tenn., the actor, 69, revealed how series creator Taylor Sheridan wrote the series with him in mind after he agreed to film a brief cameo in 1883.

“Taylor called me one time and said, ‘I wrote a cameo in this thing I’m doing called 1883 and would you come to Fort Worth for two days to do two scenes? I need a guy who has done this before. Can you come shoot everybody in the saloon and leave?’” Thornton recalled Sheridan saying. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, I can.’”

The Fargo alum said Sheridan sweetened the deal by adding he would be able to “hang out” with his friends Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, who were series regulars on the western show. After giving the television producer a resounding yes, Thornton was also invited to the series’ premiere in Las Vegas.

After the big event, he recalled having dinner with Sheridan, who revealed, “I’m writing a show for you called Landman and it’s about the oil business in Texas. It’s based on this podcast Boomtown.”

“He kind of explained it to me and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,'” Thornton continued, admitting how he was pleasantly surprised with the script. “And then, I read it and thought, ‘That’s even more interesting than I thought it was gonna be.'”

According to the offical logline, Landman, which premieres on Paramount+ on Nov. 16, tells a “modern-day tale of fortune-seeking in the world of oil rigs… an upstairs/downstairs story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires that are fueling a boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy and our geopolitics.”

The series will also star Jon Hamm, Demi Moore and Ali Larter, among others.

In a conversation with PEOPLE in March, Hamm explained why Landman will be an “interesting” pivot for Sheridan, who’s known for telling western stories of cowboys and ranch hands.

“It’s not actually cowboy-oriented at all,” the Mad Men alum said at the time. “It’s more in the world of oil. It’s based on oil speculators and what they called landmen, which are the guys that run around and try to acquire mineral rights and land rights in the hope of speculating and finding oil.”

“There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of intrigue and things like that,” Hamm noted. “It’s Taylor Sheridan and obviously it’s very well written. It’s very well-researched. It’s a story very well told, and I think it’s an interesting take on what happens when it comes to how we get the stuff that makes our cars and our lives and our planes and everything in our modern world go.”