11 Facts About Bad Santa

If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Bad Santa, it’s that the holiday season isn’t the most wonderful time of the year for everyone. The non-stop ratchet party of a film stars Billy Bob Thornton as the titular character, a functioning alcoholic and misanthrope who works as a mall Santa in order to rob department stores on Christmas Eve.

Of course, plans go haywire when the con man befriends a troubled kid (Brett Kelly) and falls for a bartender with a Santa fetish (Lauren Graham). It’s the ultimate film for pessimists who shirk at Christmas sentiment but love to throw down, making it the perfect pick-me-up to pull you through December. Get to know more about the cult classic on the 15th anniversary of its release with these fun facts about Bad Santa.

1. BILL MURRAY WAS THE FIRST CHOICE FOR THE LEAD.

According to The Guardian, Bill Murray was actually in final negotiations to take the lead, until he dropped out to film Lost in Translation. Suffice it to say, it was a win-win for both Murray and Billy Bob Thornton.

2. THE COEN BROTHERS HELPED DEVELOP THE MOVIE.

Raising Arizona, Fargo, and, er, Bad Santa? Believe it. According to director Terry Zwigoff, the Coens were actually the first choice to helm the movie. “The story I had heard was that the original writers, who wrote about 90 percent of what you see in any of the cuts, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, met the Coen brothers and said, ‘We want to write a script that you guys direct.’ And they said, ‘We only direct our own writing but we've always had this crazy idea about this drunken Santa Claus and this little person elf that has to keep him in line,” Zwigoff told IndieWire.

“So John and Glenn wrote this script," Zwigoff continued. "And the Coen brothers read it and they told them, ‘We don't want to direct it. We think it's great but we don't want to do it.’ So they asked them if they could give them some notes. And when the Coens sat down to try and give them notes over a weekend, eventually they just thought it would be easier if they take a pass on it and rewrite it.”

3. IT WAS A SINGLE LINE IN THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT THAT MADE TERRY ZWIGOFF WANT TO DIRECT THE FILM.

“I’m more interested in dialogue,” Zwigoff told The A.V. Club. “Most of the scripts I’ve gone after to direct, there’s generally just something about the dialogue.” For Bad Santa, it was one line of dialogue that hooked him. Continued Zwigoff, “It was something like, ‘Sweet Jews for Jesus!’ One of the most inspired lines I’d ever read.”

4. ZWIGOFF ISN’T A FAN OF THE THEATRICAL CUT OF THE MOVIE.

Following an interview with IndieWire, Zwigoff hosted a public screening in which he presented the director’s cut of the film, which is his preferred version. “That's the filming of the script, basically,” Zwigoff explained. “The studio wanted to mess with it and make it more mainstream and pour some fake sentiment on it for the people that stumble around the mall. Go to Target some day and look at who your target audience is. Look at the people who are out there going to films and you realize you are totally f***ed, you don't want to do anything these people like. But that director's cut is exactly the script I got. I wanted to protect the script. I like writers a lot. It was a lot darker.”

5. BILLY BOB THORNTON WENT METHOD FOR THE MOVIE.

In an interview with Film4, Billy Bob Thornton detailed exactly how he got into his alcoholic character. “I've traditionally played really extreme characters and even in a comedy, if you're going to play a guy like this, you can't be sort of drunk, you know? And I wasn't sort of drunk,” said Thornton. “You have to go completely into it. I love children, I'm crazy about them, but I had to ignore that fact and play the part.”

6. IT WAS JOHN RITTER’S FINAL FILM ROLE.

America wept when news broke that John Ritter, the beloved star of Three’s Company, passed away suddenly on September 11, 2003 of aortic dissection at the age of 54. His hilarious turn as mall manager Bob Chipeska in Bad Santa was his final feature film appearance. The movie was dedicated to his memory.

7. LAUREN GRAHAM HUMPED A CHAIR DURING HER AUDITION TO PLAY SUE THE BARTENDER.

If you’re going up for a character who’s got a fetish for Santa, you’ve really got to sell it. “I had to audition doing the scene where I first straddle Santa,” Graham recalled to Uncut. “So I’m basically in front of a room full of executives humping a chair. I really did love Billy Bob though, even more than the chair. With a character like this you have to make a big decision. I just thought: she loves anything to do with Christmas, she totally doesn’t see what’s disgusting about this particular Santa. He fulfills a strange kinda fantasy for her.”

8. ANGUS T. JONES OF TWO AND A HALF MEN WENT OUT FOR THE ROLE OF THURMAN MERMAN.

In an interview with The Province, Brett Kelly, then a student at the University of British Columbia, recalled his audition to play Thurman Merman. Among those he beat out to play Bad Santa’s sidekick was fellow chubby-cheeked actor Angus T. Jones, who’d go on to star in Two and a Half Men (before infamously trashing the show). Kelly recalled how filming the movie affected his life: “It wasn't like I was in Bad Santa and I came back and everything had changed. It was more like I got to drop in and see like, ‘Oh, that's what making movies is like.’”

9. THORNTON HAD TO DEFEND THE FILM AGAINST THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT.

Let’s be real: Bad Santa isn’t for the easily offended. Taking a cultural icon and turning him into a sex-crazed alcoholic isn’t exactly going to win over more conservative moviegoers. Which is exactly why Thornton found himself defending the movie. “We did get a few comments," Thornton told Film4, “and my reply was always, 'As far as I know, Santa Claus is not in the Bible. I think you guys are talking about Jesus.””

10. IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, THE MOVIE IS CALLED SANTA IS A PERVERT.

Films are known to change names to fit foreign markets. That’s nothing new. However, sometimes its nuance gets a little lost in translation. Case in point: the Czech Republic’s extremely literal, albeit accurate, title.

11. IN A DELETED SCENE, SARAH SILVERMAN CAMEOS AS A SANTA TEACHER.

Among the multiple scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor (much to Zwigoff’s chagrin) was a hilarious moment with Sarah Silverman. In the two-minute scene, Silverman acts as a Santa School teacher instructing a classroom of mall Santas on how to coax a smile out of a child and please their parents.