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Henry Thomas has been going west his whole life, and somehow, he keeps ending up back home.
The actor was born and raised outside San Antonio, made his first feature, “Raggedy Man,” in Corpus Christi opposite Sissy Spacek, and did all of it before a small alien and a boy on a bicycle rewrote his story forever. In the decades since, Texas has never quite let Thomas go. He shot “Cloak & Dagger” in San Antonio. He suited up for “The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid” in Dallas, at the old Texas Stadium no less. He rode through the state again for Billy Bob Thornton’s “All the Pretty Horses.” Now, with “Due West,” he’s kicking up dust in the Lone Star State one more time.
Ask Thomas what version of Texas “Due West” gets right, and he doesn’t reach for postcards.
“I think ‘Due West’ gets West Texas; The isolation of West Texas,” he says. “A lot of people who aren’t from Texas, who haven’t been to that part of Texas, they don’t understand the distances. Some of those roads go on for 50 or 60 miles, and there’s nothing in that stretch.”
That emptiness isn’t a backdrop, though. It’s a co-star.
“For ‘Due West’, that becomes a character in the piece,” he says. “You’re isolated. You’re way out there. There’s nobody going to help you. You’re on your own kind of a thing.”
He’s quick to insist Texas contains multitudes.
“Texas has a lot of stories to tell cinematically,” Thomas says. “West Texas, the light out there is just different. You can’t find that anywhere else.”
There’s an old-and-new tension he can’t shake, either. Texas, he says, is “a real melting pot of America. It’s sort of caught between the old and the new somehow.”
It’s a fitting way to describe a movie that looks like a Western but isn’t one at all.
The medical Wild West
“Due West” stars Adrianne Palicki as a small-town woman who sets out across the vast, unforgiving terrain of West Texas in search of urgent medical care after an unintended pregnancy. After her truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, every stranger she meets becomes a coin flip between compassion and exploitation, and every mile pushes her closer to a decision that will define the rest of her life.
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“It is the [West], but it’s like the new Wild West,” he says. “It’s the medical Wild West.”
What drew him in wasn’t any one specific, targeted message, however.
“I’m not a fan of going to view art or entertainment and getting something rammed down my throat, like some kind of political message, or getting hit over the head with the audience mallet,” he says. “So, when I read the script, I liked that it was ambiguous. You don’t know if these guys are good or bad when you first meet them.”
That ambiguity is the whole engine powering his character.
Pastor Mike and the turning gears
Thomas plays Pastor Mike, a man who arrives at the story convinced he understands it from a safe, comfortable distance. He has, as Thomas puts it, “a very objective view of everything, and then it suddenly becomes personal, and he’s got to be involved directly, and that makes him uncomfortable.”
The collision of that character, which feels all too familiar for many Texans, is what inspired Thomas’ performance.
“That, to me, in a nutshell, was enough of a conundrum to play,” he says. “It made the character compelling.”
Playing a figure whose morality stays hidden for much of the film is a specific kind of tightrope, and Thomas has walked it before. He credits writers Evan Miller and Hardy Janson for leaving the door open.
“It leaves the ball in the audience’s court. People can infer what they like.” But the actor, he says, always knows the truth. “You always have the knowledge that your character is a good person or a bad person … You just have to show that the gears are turning within him.”
Thomas has become oddly known for those turning gears. Audiences have learned that when he walks on screen, something devastating and beautiful is coming. He shrugs it off with signature gloom.
“I’m a glass-half-empty guy,” he tells us. “I always take the negative first.”
‘E.T.’ and a rural kind of stillness
You cannot talk to Thomas without “E.T.” arriving on a bicycle. He’s made peace with it, mostly through comedy.
“This is the longest press tour in history,” he jokes. “I’ve been promoting this film since 1982. It was literally eight weeks of my life in 1981. Usually, films don’t stick around this long.”
Thomas credits the wide-open Texas that raised him for the emotional gravity his characters can carry for 40 years.
“I grew up in a really rural area with not a lot of people around and mostly adults,” he says. “That stillness and just spending a lot of time outside growing up, it affected me, and it made me different.”
His understanding of that stillness is all over “Due West,” in the silences between strangers, in the miles of nothing and in a pastor learning to feel.
“Due West” premiered at the Dallas International Film Festival in 2025 before collecting Best Texas Narrative at Fort Worth’s Lone Star Film Festival later the same year. The road ran long, but it landed right where it started: in front of Texans.
Now the film is home. You can rent “Due West” for $3.99 or own it for $9.99 on digital and video-on-demand. Cue it up, watch that West Texas light do its work, and see how far one road can carry you.
