IN ’81 OR ’82, I JOINED A THEATER GROUP CALLED WEST COAST ENSEMBLE, where I had the great opportunity to hang out with this guy Don Blakely, who introduced me to all these great character actors like Phil Peters, Jimmy Victor, and Rip Torn. The first thing Rip Torn ever said to me was, “They told me you were from Arkansas. I’m from Texas, and I don’t like Arkansas for shit.” And I said, “Well, nice to meet you too.” Somehow through that bunch I also met Phil Bruns, a New York character actor. If you ever watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, he played Mary Hartman’s father, who on the series went crazy.
I had some great times in the West Coast Ensemble, which I was in from 1981 through about 1987 or 1988. I’m still friends with those people. I have a few friends who are leading actors. I consider Dennis Quaid and Bruce Willis good friends. I don’t see Bill Paxton that much anymore, but we came up and spent most of our time running around together in the mid- to late eighties through the early nineties, and I talk to him every now and then. But the friends that I see on a regular basis are not famous guys. The guys I was in the theater group with are the ones that come over and hang out. A couple of those guys come over just to watch movies and talk about character actors. It’s the character actors that I always loved. The guys that made me want to be an actor are the guys who were down the line on the cast list usually.
These friends are still struggling—my age and still in acting classes. They actually have other jobs. But John Ford always had the same guys in movies, and I have a couple of guys like that I try to always get in my movies, even if it’s not a movie I’m directing. Ritchie Montgomery from Natchez, Mississippi, is one of them. Cat Daddy, as we call him, was in Monster’s Ball and Jayne Mansfield’s Car—this movie we’re working on now—and a couple of other things. Brent Briscoe is another. He’s from Sling Blade and A Simple Plan, which was the part of his lifetime. I also cast him in Jayne Mansfield’s Car. Those guys are really precious to me. As you know by now, characters are real precious to me.
I have a friend named J. P. Shellnutt who we put in Jayne Mansfield’s Car. I admire him more than I do most people. He’s just a guy from Americus, Georgia, who lives in Houston and used to be a car broker, but he’s kind of a mythical creature. I met him through Billy Gibbons—I’ve known those guys from ZZ Top for more than thirty years, and they’ve always been real good to me. J.P. does security for us on the road—that’s his job title anyway—but he’s really just our hanging-out buddy. J.P. was sort of Gibbons’s mascot for a long time—now he’s mine, mainly. He’s the kind of character I’m drawn to.
JIM VARNEY WAS A GOOD FRIEND AND ONE OF THE ALL-TIME GREAT character actors. He did all the “Vern” commercials and the Ernest movies, Ernest Goes to Camp and Ernest Goes to Jail. He ended up making a lot of money from it.
Varney grew up working in a tobacco barn. He’s a descendant of the Hatfields and he and I tried to make the Hatfield and McCoy story for years. Nobody could quite get it. Varney had a DeLorean up on blocks in his yard—a DeLorean up on blocks, now that’s a hillbilly—and with all the money he had, he still lived in a three-bedroom brick house in White House, Tennessee, which was Andrew Jackson’s stopover place when he’d return to Nashville.
He even had a bumper sticker on the back of his sports car, which said, IT’S ME, IT’S ME, IT’S ERNEST T, you know, from The Andy Griffith Show. One time he came to pick me up in front of the Loews in Vanderbilt Plaza there in Nashville. The car park guys came out, and I said, “No, he’s just picking me up.” But then I saw Varney—who kept mouthwash in the middle of the console—opening his door and spitting the mouthwash right out by the car park guy. He was just that way.
He used to call me Elvis. One time he goes, “Hey, Elvis, I want to take you to a place that will blow your mind,” and he took me to this strip joint that was in the middle of a dirt parking lot. You’d walk through this curtain, and there was a guy behind one of those windows where you pass the money underneath. Now, this was in the mideighties, before I was famous. I was an actor, and I was in shit, but I wasn’t like Jim Varney. People in Nashville knew who he was. Anyway, we go in there, and he goes, “You’re going to love this shit, Elvis, the chicks in here are hotter than hell.” But this was in the middle of the day, and the two in the afternoon shift at a strip joint is usually not very good. I could see through the curtain, and it was just three drunks and a couple of old worn-out girls who had operation scars and shit.
So, I was just kind of standing there in the shadows when the guy behind the window goes, “Hey, man, wait a minute, are you who I think you are?” Varney puts our five bucks or whatever underneath the thing and goes, “Yeah, but let’s don’t start no circus.”
Varney was a real cheap tipper, and he gave the guy a dollar to keep quiet. A dollar. I used to go behind Varney all the time because his tips rattled. We’d be at the Four Seasons and Varney would give them, like, fifty cents on a $300 bill, so I’d always go behind him and put some money down because it was embarrassing. But he was the greatest guy I ever knew in my life and a great actor who got pigeonholed as that Ernest character he created, but it was fantastic.