Even given the fact that that’s the only thing that’s in any way interesting about him in a musical context, Jian barely mentioned the fact that he was an actor in a throwaway paragraph at the beginning of an interview where he manfully played along with the fiction that he was interviewing a musician, until said fictional musician decided to throw his toys out of the pram.

At this point, as proven by the massive response to it, it actually became interesting precisely because it gave an insight into BBT’s personality and the motivations behind his “art” – which is the kind of thing cultural journalism is supposed to do.

Just yesterday, Darryl Stuerdan had a published interview with Chris Martin of Coldplay. In the article, Stuerdan mentions that he was asked/told not to speak of Martin’s personal life with G. Paltrow or his present legal problems regarding song ownership. What did he do? He honoured the request and proceeded to conduct a valid interview.

It’s a question of respect, pure and simple. If you do not want to follow the instruction, then you can –on principle– refuse to conduct the interview or to air it, later on. It would have been alot more revealing had the Q team said : “we refused to conduct the interview because Billy Bob did not want us mention his acting career”.

You know why they didn’t do that? Because we’d have concluded that they had nothing else to talk about.

The interview proved it.

The Smoking Gun’s copy of his rider rider makes for good reading if you’re still unsure as to how committed he is to keeping his careers sandboxed from each other:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/billybob/billybob1.html

I particularly like the fact that they have to be billed as “Billy Bob Thornton And Special Guests The Boxmasters”, and that he gets his own room separate from the band.