Sam Elliott has heard the word iconic enough times to know it can sound bigger than the work itself. The 81-year-old actor says he is not thinking in those terms. “What I feel like is that I’m just old and I’m still lucky to be working,” he said after a recent Directors Guild event where people were talking about him that way.
That sentiment fits the way Elliott is approaching the second season of Landman, where he plays Thomas “TL” Norris, the father of Tommy Norris and grandfather of Cooper and Ainsley. TL is a lifelong oil field worker whose years of hard labor and alcohol abuse have taken their toll. He begins the season in a rundown nursing home, mostly confined to a wheelchair, after his wife dies at the start of the story. Later, after Tommy speaks with Angela, Tommy agrees to bring him back to Midland to live with the family.
For Elliott, the role is another turn in a career that has stretched across six decades and made him one of the most recognizable faces in film and television. He has long been associated with cowboy and tough-guy parts in projects including Tombstone, Mask, The Big Lebowski and The Sacketts, but he said the draw this time was as much personal as professional. He first worked with Taylor Sheridan on 1883 in 2023, and that experience made a return easy to justify.
“There wasn’t any turning Taylor down after my experience with him on ‘1883,’” Elliott said. “He’s such a talented man.” He added that he feels fortunate to be part of Sheridan’s world and said, “I just feel fortunate to be involved with him.” He also said the people around the show share that feeling, noting, “I know for a fact that everybody on the show feels the same way.”
The new season also puts Elliott opposite Billy Bob Thornton, who plays Tommy Norris, and he does not sound as if he is interested in settling into any veteran status on set. “I’m working with Billy Bob Thornton, so I’m going to be learning something from him this time around,” Elliott said. “Even though he’s playing my son, he’s still got something to offer.” He praised Thornton as someone who has been in the business a long time and called him not only a brilliant actor but also a capable director and writer.
That exchange cuts against the easy image of Elliott as the older legend arriving to bestow wisdom. He said he still looks back at his early days as a contract player at Fox in 1978 and sees room for improvement in work he did then. “I know back when I was starting out, when I was doing whatever I could do as a contract player at Fox, the early days, and I look back on some of that work now, I think ‘If only I’d have done this or that,’” he said. Even now, he added, he is struck by what younger performers are bringing to the screen. “I’m pretty amazed at the talent out there in the world today. It’s incredible.”
On the Landman set, Elliott says he is treated like everyone else, which may be the clearest sign of how the production sees him: not as a shrine to the past, but as an actor still expected to do the work. That matters because TL Norris is not a decorative part. He is a broken father figure pulled back into the family after a lifetime in the oil fields, and the story around him is built on decline, obligation and uneasy reunion. When TL later falls into a swimming pool and cannot get himself out, the character’s fragility becomes impossible to miss. Elliott’s casting gives that turn extra force. At 81, he is still being asked to carry a role built around damage, memory and survival, and he says that is exactly the point — he is still working, and still lucky to be doing it.
