As Bad Santa 2 is set to hit the silver screen, we celebrate the actor, director and musician’s unconventional career.

There is a rare breed of actor whose glare can pierce the darkness of an auditorium like a bolt of lightning. Like Messrs Robert Shaw, Gregory Peck, and Richard Harris before him, Mr Billy Bob Thornton is one of those eccentric, elusive Hollywood heavyweights you wish you knew more about. In contrast to many of his press-managed movie peers, there’s something intangibly individualistic about the Arkansas-born Mr Thornton – from his hick-from-hell dress sense to his Zippo-flicking, screen-stealing acting bravura and side career as a country-rock singer, songwriter and drummer.

Perhaps that’s why in 2016 — the undisputed year of the underdog, for better or worse – he is going through a purple patch, 30 years after he began his acting career. In many ways, Mr Thornton – recently the lead in both the Emmy-winning first series of Fargo and Amazon Prime’s legal drama Goliath – is the era’s quintessential Hollywood anti-hero, an antidote to the clean-shaven, silver-screen darling. In Fargo, Mr Thornton plays Lorne Malvo, a cunning, malevolent hit man who takes pleasure in tormenting his victims. In Goliath, he’s Billy McBride, a sad-sack divorcee who lives in a motel next to his favourite bar and goes drinking with his daughter. In the forthcoming London Fields – the adaptation of Mr Martin Amis’ nail-biting novel – he leads a star-studded cast as a deeply flawed but successful novelist, gripped by writer’s block and a terminal illness.

His recent career reboot is perhaps indicative of a larger paradigm shift in popular culture: the desire in audiences for an alternative type of lead character, one that is both downtrodden and relatable, yet genuinely subversive – able to battle the odds and come out on top. Take Mr Bryan Cranston’s turn as a cancer sufferer who goes gangster in Breaking Bad, or Mr Matthew McConaughey’s troubled private investigator “Rust” in True Detective; or even serial-killer-turned-detective, Dexter. In a year of political turmoil, economic downturn and deep social unrest, one thing is for certain: the new heroes of TV and film are just as fallible as you or I.

Fallible, much like Willie T Stokes, 2003 comedy Bad Santa’s tequila-slugging layabout, who steals from department stores dressed as St Nick. Mr Thornton reprises the role this winter in Bad Santa 2, this time with a head of seasonal-grey hair. This year also marks the 20th anniversary of Sling Blade, the familial drama Mr Thornton wrote, directed and appeared in as the mentally ill Karl Childers – which won him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar and earmarked him as film’s big new alternative star.

In the years since his enrapturing directorial debut, Mr Thornton has tackled a number of anti-hero personas. In Mr Sam Raimi’s 1998 thriller A Simple Plan, he was captivating as the mentally handicapped brother of Mr Bill Paxton, who, alongside Ms Bridget Fonda, decides to keep the bag of cash they find in a crashed aeroplane. In 2001’s multi-award-winning Monster’s Ball, he is alleged to have had un-simulated on-screen sex with Ms Halle Berry, while playing a widowed corrections officer in a hellish prison complex in Louisiana.

But it took The Man Who Wasn’t There – the Coen Brothers’ slow-burning heist comedy – to confirm Mr Thornton’s cult icon status. Co-starring Ms Frances McDormand and the late Mr James Gandolfini, the film sees Mr Thornton playing a sharp-dressing barber who anonymously blackmails the man his wife is cheating on him with to raise funds for a dry-cleaning business. Full of classically Coen-ish dry rebuttals, TMWWT is Mr Thornton at his coolest; a modern-day Mr Humphrey Bogart complete with a bottomless pack of Camels, a handsomely leathery, pitted complexion and an answer for everything.

But it’s not just in the movies that Mr Thornton is rebel-minded: judging by his apparent disdain for interviews, it’s clear he’s far from risk-averse in real life, too. It’s unusual for a mainstream actor to show quite so much disregard for PR and celebrity etiquette. Back in 2009, Thornton appeared on CBC radio with his band The Boxmasters to talk about his career as a musician (Mr Thornton now has four country-tinged LPs under his belt – the latest being 2007’s Beautiful Door – and six with the band he drums in, The Boxmasters), turning grumpy and monosyllabic after host Mr Jian Ghomeshi introduced him as an actor, screenwriter, director and musician. “Would you say that to Tom Petty?” Mr Thornton later snarled. When his band were set to perform after the interview, Mr Thornton refused to join them, claiming he didn’t have his drums: “We don’t cart those things around at six o’clock in the morning.”

Then there was the time, in the early 2000s, when he and then-wife Ms Angelina Jolie turned up to a film premiere wearing lockets containing each other’s blood. It added to the mystique of a man known for his unpredictability both on and off screen – the kind of human-after-all celebrity that is celebrated as much for his talent as his personal quirks. His recent return as film’s offbeat leading man says a lot about the ways modern TV and film narratives have evolved, where the everyday types who often slip through the cracks are championed for rising through them again. Whatever the reasons for his continued rise, be grateful we still have Mr Billy Bob Thornton.