November 20, 2025
Lounis Tiar/SOPA Images via Sipa USA
Ali Larter, a Cherry Hill native, is on a media tour to promote the new season of 'Landman,' a popular Paramount+ drama that follows a family oil business in Texas. Above, Larter attends the Season 2 U.K. premiere this month in London.
"Landman" star Ali Larter reminisced about her Jersey upbringing and shared what it's like working alongside Billy Bob Thornton during a Wednesday night appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
The Cherry Hill native, who got her acting start in a Phillies commercial over 30 years ago, is on a media tour to promote the new season of the popular Paramount+ drama that follows a family oil business in Texas. Larter said she takes an the empathetic approach to all the characters she plays, including Angela in "Landman."
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When asked by Kimmel what's the most "Jersey" thing about her, she referenced her "banter with cops and firemen" and her mother's persistent pronunciation of "wooder," adding the accent is not difficult to slip back into. She also talked about her initial shock at having to pump her own gas after leaving the state.
"Who wants to get out and pump gas? I don't," she said. "Another reason why Jersey rules."
Larter, 49, and her family moved to a small, rural town in Idaho during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she said has forced her to slow down – which Kimmel joked can't be easy for someone from New Jersey.
"You have to have perfect manners at all times," she said. "I talk fast, I'm a multitasker – it's completely made me try to find the patience somewhere deep inside of me."
During a column this week in the Wall Street Journal, Larter said she was 13 years old and eating snapper soup at Bookbinder's in Old City when she was approached for her first acting gig.
"A talent agent came over and asked if I wanted to be in a Philadelphia Phillies commercial," she said. "... From that day forward, everything changed."
She took acting classes in Philadelphia as a teenager but spent much of her adolescent years modeling in New York, Japan and Milan before booking her breakout role in the 1999 film "Varsity Blues," where she famously played a cheerleader who wore a whipped cream bikini.
Larter has made a career out of bringing heart to characters that may otherwise be written off as one-dimensional. She's played a stripper with superhuman strength on NBC's "Heroes" and a vain fitness instructor wrongfully accused of murder in "Legally Blonde." Her latest role, while perhaps not a beacon of feminism, still leads with a strength and fierceness.
"Throughout my career, women are always tremendously underwritten," she told the New York Times earlier this month. "It's the work as an actor to fill in all those moments with humanity and life and joy and pain and laughter."
During its first season, "Landman" racked up over 35 million viewers worldwide and became the streaming service's most popular original series.
Larter called Thornton, who plays Angela's ex-husband, "one of a kind," telling Kimmel that her co-star can frequently be found drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette on set.
"In the show our relationship is very vitriolic," she said. "... We're really oil and water."
New episodes of the second season are released Sundays on Paramount+.
