When Landman premiered its first two episodes last week, one face stood out in the crowd.
She was the actress who played Ainsley Norris, the wild and sexually extroverted daughter of Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter, in Taylor Sheridan’s saga set in the midst of the Permian Basin oil boom in West Texas.
The woman behind the 17-year-old girl in a bikini is Michelle Randolph.
And if her pretty face looks familiar, it’s because the 27-year-old from Napa Valley, California, has worked with Sheridan before.
That was Michelle as the reserved prairie wife Elizabeth Strafford in the 1923 Yellowstone prequel. She worked alongside Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.
Randolph also appeared in House Of The Witch, The Resort and A Snow White Christmas.
When Landman premiered its first two episodes last week, one face stood out in the crowd. She was the actress who played Ainsley Norris, the wild and sexually extroverted daughter of Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter, in Taylor Sheridan’s saga set in the midst of the Permian Basin oil boom in West Texas.
The woman behind the 17-year-old girl in a bikini is Michelle Randolph. And if her pretty face looks familiar, it’s because the 27-year-old from Napa Valley, California, worked with Sheridan before in 1923; seen on November 12
The star, who used to date Gregg Sulkin, said playing the uninhibited Ainsley was “refreshing.”
“I learned a lot playing Ainsley,” he said via LRM Online.
“She’s a wild seventeen-year-old girl and getting into that helped me embrace myself more and I found it really refreshing.”
Michelle described her character as a “very interesting medium between the two parents” and discovers that her parents are “flawed people”:
“I think Ainsley is a very interesting kind of intermediary between the two parents and loves them both deeply,” Michelle said.
But he is about to realize that they have flaws as humans. “It’s fun to see her throughout this season take this journey to learn that her parents are imperfect people too.”
Michelle also has a famous brother.
She is the younger sister of The Bachelor season 23 winner Cassie Randolph.
Together they have a sustainable denim brand called LNDN Denim which they launched in 2022. Michelle told US Magazine that LNDN is actually short for ‘Landon’, the younger brother of the two sisters.
When C Magazine asked why she used denim for the line, Michelle explained, “It’s everything people wear in California” and that it took the sisters “three years to perfect it.”
In Landman she is seen rubbing oil on her body by the pool.
The Randolph teenager at a football game with her father Tommy, played by Billy Bob Thornton.
And he stars with Ali Larter, right, who plays his tough mother Angela.
Landman centers on Tommy Norris (Thornton), a tough executive at the M-Tex Oil company in Texas.
The series premiere begins with a tied Tommy with a bag over his head while discussing a lease with a cartel member.
He survives the intense exchange and continues working with businessman Monty Miller (Hamm) while balancing relationships with his ex-wife Angela (Larter) and their children Ainsley (Randolph) and oil worker Cooper (Jacob Lofland).
The series premiere takes a dark turn after Cooper’s entire team on the oil rig is killed in an explosion.
She was also in the Yellowstone prequel (1923) as the reserved prairie wife Elizabeth Strafford.
Seen here with Darren Mann, who plays Jack Dutton.
Her character was the opposite of her role as Landman because Elizabeth is not sure of herself.
Michelle’s Ainsley is as wild as can be.
The teenager takes her soccer star boyfriend to meet her dad in West Texas.
She doesn’t mind telling her father that they’ve already had sex everywhere and adding that he’s keeping her from getting pregnant – it’s rude and Tommy grimaces.
Billy’s Tommy hates the boy. And as dad predicts, the athlete is a real idiot.
Ainsley finds out and leaves him, then spends her afternoons sunbathing in a bikini by Dad’s pool, which is hard for Tommy’s roommates to endure.
Paramount+’s Landman TV series premiered on November 17; stars Billy in the lead
Thornton’s co-stars include A-list actors Jon Hamm and Demi Moore.
Landman focuses on the massive oil boom in Texas and how some of the biggest oil tycoons in the sector will go to great lengths to maintain their vast wealth.
The series is co-created by the man behind the Yellowstone universe, Sheridan, 53, and podcaster Christian Wallace.
Landman, like Yellowstone, is set in the present day and was inspired by the popular podcast Boomtown, which chronicles a 21st century oil boom in West Texas.
The logline for the series describes it as “an up-and-down story of thugs and savage billionaires fueling a boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy and our geopolitics.”