Don’t Speak to Sam Elliott

You do not get much more classic than Sam Elliott. At 81, he is still going strong and looking good on the red carpet at the Actor Awards alongside his wife, Katharine Ross. His moustache alone could carry an entire career.

Speaking to The National, he struck a bittersweet note about the media landscape. “You look at the current climate, it’s hard to find, from my perspective, who most represents the American man that I would look up to. It’s pretty dark out there.”

As Louis Theroux’s Manosphere documentary illustrates, there is a thirst among younger crowds for strong male role models, and there are people willing to capitalise on this demand. It’s just a shame.

Elliott stepped away from the limelight for a while, returning only after Taylor Sheridan lured him back with a role in Landman alongside Billy Bob Thornton.

“It’s one of the reasons I turn a lot of work down,” he says. “In a lot of the work I get offered, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to represent anything I could be proud of.”

Taylor Sheridan, best known for Yellowstone and 1883, was determined to get Elliott back in the saddle. That came in the form of Landman, in which Elliott plays the father of Billy Bob Thornton’s character, Tommy Norris, in season two. Elliott has been delighted with the role.

“It’s just a pure gift,” Elliott tells The National News. “That’s become the most overused term in my vocabulary over the last few years since I met Taylor. I’ve had a lot of gifts in my career, and I don’t think any of them are richer than this one.”

The pair are terrific together, having previously worked alongside each other in 1993’s Tombstone.

“One of the hardest things to do as an actor is to be either mean or disrespectful to someone that you love so much in real life,” Thornton told TV Line. “Sam and I both feel that. So every time we did a scene together, we would always hug each other, and he’d go, ‘I love you, buddy.'”

So what is it like meeting Elliott? About what you would expect, according to Riley Green.

“I met Sam Elliott several years ago at an awards show … and we spoke, but he didn’t say a word.

I just said, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ when I walked by … He just growled at me, which was awesome, but we didn’t really meet.”