Feb 16, 2007 By Lou Gaul, Calkins Media Film Critic 4 min read

Billy Bob Thornton used one word – scary – to describe the experience of being stalked by paparazzi during his marriage to Angelina Jolie. “When Angie and I were together, just by the nature of the celebrity-couple thing, people were hiding in the bushes (to take their picture) and that kind of thing,” Thornton said at his hotel during a Philadelphia publicity stop for “The Astronaut Farmer,” which opens Feb. 23. “It was scary.

“I’ve had a couple of instances where things got kind of frightening. We were in a car, and when you see this Princess Diana thing (her death in a car crash in Paris), it really wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to imagine that.

“It happened to me once (being chased by a car), and I was irresponsible, too, in the situation. I should have just stopped instead of trying to get away from these people.

“You just stop and let them fire off their pictures. That’s one thing I’ve learned: if you let people take pictures, you look a lot better. If you’re posing, you can look OK, but if you aren’t, you can look pretty stupid.”

Thornton, who has been divorced five times, and Jolie made headlines for their eccentric behavior, such as wearing jewelry containing each other’s blood, but once they split, Thornton traveled a very different road. As his ex-wife became involved with Brad Pitt, adopted foreign children and raised her public profile, he stopped going to parties and premieres and settled down with his girlfriend and daughter in a house with a studio that allows him to record his original songs.

“I’ve managed to stay out of the trash papers,” he said of his current life, which he shares with his girlfriend, Connie Angland, and their daughter, Bella, born in 2004. “I don’t go anywhere or participate in anything, and I stay out of Hollywood.”

Finding work certainly hasn’t been difficult for Thornton, a dependable actor who leisurely goes from one project to the next.

His recent efforts include “School for Scoundrels” with Jon Heder, “The Bad News Bears” remake with Greg Kinnear, “Friday Night Lights” with Derek Luke, “Bad Santa” with Lauren Graham and “The Alamo” (in which he memorably portrays Davy Crockett) with Dennis Quaid.

In “The Astronaut Farmer,” he plays a former astronaut who missed his NASA mission due to a family tragedy. In mid-life, the salt-of-the-earth character enlists his wife (Virginia Madsen of “Firewall”) and three children in a quest to help him build a rocket in their barn so that he can blast off into space.

Thornton sees the PG-rated picture, directed by Michael Polish (“Twin Falls Idaho”), as an uplifting tale about the importance of following your dreams, a message he believes will appeal to families and inspire young people to study America’s space program.

“I think most boys are (infatuated by the space program),” the 51-year-old actor said. “It’s really telling my age here, but when I was a kid, John Glenn was a big deal to us.

“He was the first guy to go up in orbit, and he had that sort of cowboy thing about him. He was that stoic, American guy.

“We (he and his friends) used to play astronauts, but we played Davy Crockett more, and I even got to play him in a film.”

Although proud of “Bad Santa” Thornton worries that some people miss the point of the dark humor and see the comedy, which is available in three different versions on DVD, as an anti-Christmas movie.

“‘Bad Santa’ is pretty funny,” he said, “and I remember when the movie first came out, it was the most well-reviewed comedy of that time. There was hardly anybody that didn’t love that movie, other than a few people.

“I remember (CNN newsman) Lou Dobbs saying that I had ruined the name of Santa Claus. I thought to myself, ‘You’re a money-line guy. Why are you even talking about this?’

“I have to tell those people that in ‘Bad Santa,’ I wasn’t playing Santa Claus. I was playing a criminal pretending to be Santa.

“If I was playing Santa Claus (as a thief, womanizer and drunk), it would have been different.”