Part Two of the interview: In this exciting episode, Billy Bob comments on more rumors about his lifestyle, how he copes with media scrutiny, his recent concert tours of Europe and the U.S., and how he singlehandedly continues to lose the Civil War.

Amélie (A): Rather than going after something specifically, what are some of the wildest rumors you've ever heard about yourself that just made you laugh out loud, just shake your head and go, "Oh, my God!"

Billy Bob Thornton (BBT): Stuff like I've got a dungeon, you know, things like that. It's just stupid. It's not true. That I have an electric chair, which I don't have, uh...what else...I don't know. They kind of like wear out these same ones is what they do. The same stupid things they always say. These days, I don't know what the rumors are because I quit watching television altogether. (Indicates a big-screen TV the size of Texas, Mr. President.) That thing may as well be a refrigerator, you know what I mean? I don't turn it on. I listen to music, that's all I do. I'm either listening to music, recording music, playing music, or working on a movie, or playing with the kids. That's all I do, I don't read magazines. When I check into a hotel, the first thing I do is throw the entertainment magazines into the trash. I don't read the newspaper. I don't do any of that stuff, so, uh, I don't really know. But the last one that made me laugh a lot (because people tell me this stuff--sometimes you have friends who think you wanna know for some reason?) . . . was this thing, something in US magazine or something like that (evidently they thought it was important enough to put on the cover of US magazine--why I'll never know because it's not that big a story to tell). But anyway, it said that I go out--this is good to put on here because this is what I would like to dispel about my personal life; it's the only one I'd like to talk about--it said I had this habit of inviting women on stage to dance. Which has NEVER happened.

A: It didn't happen in L.A.

Sage (S): It didn't happen in Austin.

A: You don't like to dance.

BBT: Well, no. At all.

A: You're not a dancer.

BBT: And, uh, certainly don't want a bunch of people on stage with me, because it's crazy enough when people get drunk and come up there anyways. One girl, might have been in Austin, did a girl go on stage in Austin? I don't remember where it was. Might have been Toronto.

A: Might have been Atlanta.

BBT: Could've been Atlanta, there were a few weird characters there. Maybe it was Atlanta. One of the places, a girl got through security and ran out on stage, and they just put her off. They were very nice to her, all that. So whether that's how it got started, I don't know, but I never invited anybody to dance onstage. In London, I invited a few people in the front row like maybe five people, up on stage to sing a chorus of a song with me, which they did, and they had fun. It was great. The audience loved that we did that. It was a nice thing. Um, so anyway, that was stupid, it made me laugh. And also I spent on my tour, on the U.S. tour, I had a lot of wild, late nights in bars after shows. And anybody who knows me, first of all, knows better than that because I don't go to bars, I mean, unless I'm playing in one. I took the crew out, maybe twice, to a restaurant. But the thing is, that's silly because after the shows we'd get on the bus went to the next place, so it wasn't even possible to do that [go to bars], so I don't know how.

A: They took Mica (Note: Mica Roberts, the back-up singer of the Billy Bob Thornton band.) getting on your bus because her bus had taken off in Austin, and you guys went out and caught up with her bus. They turned that into a "mysterious woman."

BBT: That wasn't even Mica.

A: It wasn't even her?

BBT: No, that wasn't Mica. That was Felicia.

A: Felicia! His assistant!

BBT: My assistant. She got on the bus and stayed on the bus. But some of the guys got on the bus with us in Austin. We did that every night. We had two buses, and I was just on the bus with Felicia, and I was getting lonely and shit, you know, and we'd get Sam Bacco, our percussionist, you know, Sam and Randy (Note: Randy Mitchell, one of the band's three guitarists) and Mike (Note: Michael Shipp, BBT's lifelong partner in musical crime and band guitarist). Mike got on the bus with me that night, and they didn't say anything about him, you know what I mean? It's not like they said "three guys got on the bus, and later on they changed buses." Well, yeah, we did that every night. Part of the band would ride on one bus, part of 'em would ride on the other, and at some place we would stop for gas. The other guys, you know, they would have to go to sleep, and my bus didn't have bunks.

A: Yeah, Mike [Shipp] used to call me from the bus. We would talk for a couple of hours. He'd be telling me, "Oh yeah, we're tired. They're asleep." I know that, on tour like that, you really have to conserve your energy for your performance, and you're not behaving the way it's reported at all.

BBT: There's not a lot of time. Most places are pretty far away, and you gotta get going, you know. So, uh, anyway, all that was crap. So, that really made me laugh, because our tour was SO not wild. You know, I mean, most of the guys in the group, we don't have guys that do drugs, we . . . got guys in the band who don't even drink.

A: Mike's a straight arrow.

BBT: Mike and I would have like two beers something like that. If that's a wild night, okay. But... the times when I did anything that would be considered any kind of...any "behavior" would have been when we were actually playing. Sometimes, I would have a couple on stage, you know, tell some crazy story or something like that, but other than that, it was pretty tame, really. In Europe no one really knew who we were so we weren't going to do anything there. (Laughs).

S: I brought Kinky to the Austin show, he really enjoyed it. [Note: Kinky is country western singer and mystery author Kinky Friedman.]

BBT: Oh, good. I didn't get to see Kinky either.

S: It was crazy. But he enjoyed it.

BBT: Oh good. That's good. We had a great time in Austin. Austin and New Orleans were both good shows. New Orleans was, like, insane.

A: Yeah, according to my friend Diana who was there, she walked you to the theater. She found you outside, and you walked together.

BBT: Oh yeah!

A: It was, by the way the thrill of her life. She adores you.

BBT: Oh yeah?

A: Yeah.

BBT: Yeah, she was that girl on the sidewalk when we first pulled up. Yeah, I think I came over in a cab. (Laughs)

A: Yeah and she saw you and thought it's now or never I better ask "Can I walk with you?" . . . She drove all the way from Camp Hill Alabama with her daughter to see you. She came out to our first BillyBobapalooza in Hot Springs (Note: Billybobapalooza is not only the name of this site, it is also the name of the occasional gatherings of BBT's fans.) She's a very devoted fan. Getting back to rumors...you've been really famous, I mean, world-famous for about six years, to the point where when you win your Oscar, you're in front of a billion people watching. That's got to be a huge culture shock, coming from your background. How do you adjust to that, especially when you're in a position where there are benefits to that, but you also get people trashing your private life. How do you live with that?

BBT: Well, you live with it the way I was describing earlier. You quit paying attention to the media. You shut it out of your life, which is a shame. It's like, I like to take my kids to the movies, but it's hard to even go to a movie. They take pictures of them, you know.

A: And you don't want them doing that.

BBT: I don't really like it when they take pictures of the kids. My ex-wife and I are friends, and we try to be pretty strict about that. She goes a lot of places with us, my ex. We take the kids together. Sometimes, we take 'em to the movies several times together. But you know, that's the way you deal with it. Just try to stay out of it. I really don't go anywhere, or do anything. I'm really content just to sit. They're still working on the house now. I'll be able to go back to the house pretty soon in a few days, and also they're still loading in equipment and getting everything back in order in the studio. You know, like everything is out of the room, now it's back, and uh, [there are] a lot of people there that are workers almost every day doing something to the house. They're almost done. I'll go back there. It'll be nice because I love to be in the studio. I'm content to just sit there in the studio all night. On the weekends, when my kids are over, we have a great time jumping on the trampoline. We play baseball on the tennis court.

A: Play Civil War.

BBT: Oh yeah, we do, we play Civil War. Although when we play Civil War, they got the plastic Civil War soldiers, like we have the blue and the gray and everything but...Willie is usually the Union Army and I'm the Confederate Army. It's usually just me and Willie that play. Harry plays sometimes. Harry likes to play outdoors. He's always out there. But, I also got these guys who are ...these plastic soldiers you get. They got some brown ones, and I think they're like frontier kinda guys, like the Alamo or something like that.

A: Sorta like Big George. (Note: BBT's character in DEAD MAN.)

BBT: Yeah, like him, those kinda guys. I got a bunch of those too. So Willie gives me those, the brown guys so I put them with the Confederate Army. He takes the World War II soldiers and puts them with the Union army. Somehow he ends up with all the stuff...since he has the World War II guys, he has tanks and forts and tents, and me I got like these little plastic sandbag barriers, that's about all I got. I lose all the time. He's really good at it. The way we play is we take these little rockets. They're about this long . . . there are red ones and black ones that you put them in, like, this little ol' launcher thing. You push a little button, and they shoot. It's this little plastic thing, and what we do is, we take those, and we just throw 'em, like I get my guys over here, and his are over there on the floor, right? And we just take turns. I get to throw. He gets to throw. Until somebody loses.

S: Which would be the South.

BBT: Exactly. And that's what happens every time. The South gets knocked out every time.