Landman star Michelle Randolph “disassociated” to get through controversial line

Landman star Michelle Randolph knows why her most controversial line went viral; she couldn’t keep a straight face during the shoot.

The scene sees Randolph, who plays daughter Ainsley to Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris, frankly and publicly discussing her intimacy with her new boyfriend, Dakota. He asks if they are being intimate and if they’re being careful. A clip of her blunt (and decidedly non-family friendly) response has since gone viral, and she’s not surprised.

In a new interview, the actress reveals that while shooting the scene, she was completely aware of how the line could be received.

Randolph cracked up, disassociated, and powered through

In the interview with The Wrap, Randolph was asked if she’d seen that the clip went viral. “How could you not?” she responded. “I knew. You knew. I just thought to myself, ‘How am I going to say this with a straight face, looking into Billy’s eyes?’”

Paramount

Sometimes the only way out is through, and she entirely committed to Ainsley’s headspace: “I was Ainsley in that moment,” she said, “I was not Michelle. And as Michelle, I will never be saying that to my father. Let’s be clear.”

That isn’t to say it wasn’t difficult to pull the scene off. “There was definitely a point where my face turned bright red and we started laughing, because I just couldn’t help it,” she added, particularly because the scene was shot at a real football game. “There’s people watching, and I’m like, they don’t know anything about the show. They don’t know the scripts. They don’t know the premise, and if they can overhear this one line, what do they think that we’re filming?” the actress mused.

As Ainsley, she powered through: “I just disassociated.”

Landman has already set viewership records for Paramount+, and its most controversial line going viral surely didn’t hurt. You can catch Landman only on Paramount+.