Tommy Lee Jones Returns to TV, but His Heart Is on 6,000 Texas Acres

Tommy Lee Jones is back on television for the first time in decades, in "The Lowdown" — but he'd rather talk about the feral hogs tearing up his lawn. The actor, 6,000 acres deep in the Texas Hill Country, spoke to The New York Times from his ranch home in San Saba, the small town where he was born, returned as an adult, and where he remains a registered voter.

The hogs have been digging up his yard in a frenzied quest for grubs, leaving the lawn a patchwork of grass and dirt. Jones, never much a believer in physical barriers, is reluctantly weighing a fence. "I didn't want any fences around the house," he said from his ranch office. "As you can see, the house has an architectural statement to make."

What kind of house makes that statement?

It started life as a fort in 1856 — "when Sam Houston was still alive," Jones noted. Today it's a stately, two-story limestone structure, its entrance flanked by a pair of overgrown purple sage shrubs. Those shrubs, like the hogs, are another wild thing demanding the owner's attention. The property sits on 6,000 acres in the Hill Country, west of Austin, functioning less as a celebrity estate than as a working base for a man who keeps horses and dislikes the machinery of fame.

His wife of 25 years, Dawn Laurel Jones, put the retreat in blunt terms. "It's very alienating for him to be objectified so thoroughly," she said, "even in some of the most private moments that he can't even process without being under a microscope."

Why did he go back to San Saba?

Jones's own explanation is characteristically spare. "There came a time when I became aware that I could live anywhere I wanted to," he said, slippered feet propped on the cowhide surface of his broad desk. "So, in my wisdom, I went home."

That single sentence explains the geometry of his career better than any press release. The actor, who has famously little patience for the rituals of fame, treats the ranch as a respite from the public demands of show business. San Saba isn't a backdrop for him; it's the fixed point, and Hollywood is the place he visits.

What does the TV return change?

Not much, on the evidence of this profile. "The Lowdown" marks Jones's first television work in decades, a genuine shift for an actor who has spent recent years largely on film. But the profile's framing suggests the job won't pull him back into the celebrity grind. He gave the interview from behind his desk, on his own land, in the town that has held his voter registration since before his Hollywood years ended.

The Times piece was reported from the San Saba ranch, with visuals by Christopher Lee, and its details — hogs, sage, limestone, slippers on cowhide — read as a deliberate portrait of a star who has engineered his own distance from the spotlight. The television role is the news; the fence he may build against the hogs is the life.