One of the rawest moments in Season 2 of Landman was not just Jacob Lofland acting. The actor revealed this week that a key father-son scene with Billy Bob Thornton hit especially hard because he had recently lost his own dad.
Speaking at the show’s FYC event in Los Angeles, Lofland said a quiet truck conversation between Cooper and Tommy Norris became one of the most powerful scenes he has ever filmed.
“Me and Billy in the truck, talking about how much a son loves his dad … I just recently lost my dad,” Lofland said to People in an interview. “It was a nice moment.”
Lofland’s father died in July 2025, just as Season 2 was taking shape. On-screen, Cooper and Tommy were finally starting to repair years of damage.
Earlier in the season, Tommy confessed that his own father’s absence—and his mother’s alcoholism—left him terrified he had become a failure as a parent. Cooper answered with a line that landed like a gut punch: he loved Tommy anyway.
For two seasons, Landman has built its emotional core around the fractured relationship between Tommy and Cooper. Cooper started the series as the screw-up son: a college dropout, working dangerous oil-field jobs and constantly trying to prove himself.
Tommy, meanwhile, was too busy cleaning up disasters for M-Tex Oil to deal with the disaster brewing at home.
By the end of Season 2, that dynamic had completely flipped. After being fired by Cami Miller and pushed out of M-Tex, Tommy launched his own company, CTT Oil. And the first person he put in charge was Cooper.
As it turns out, Lofland knows the world of Landman firsthand. His father and uncles worked as roughnecks and welders in Texas oil fields, the same brutal, boom-and-bust world that the show has spent two seasons capturing.
“My dad actually worked in the oil field, so to be able to shed light on that, it really means a lot to me,” Lofland said.
The actor has previously spoken about how losing his father forced him to grow up fast. “You’ve always had that person that no matter what you could call,” he said in an earlier interview. “Once that’s gone, there’s just a lonely feeling.”
He added that losing a parent leaves no room to keep drifting: “You better become the man that he’s taught you to be.”
