Bad Thoughts: Is Rex Henley Based on a Real Country Music Singer and Serial Killer?

In Netflix’s ‘Bad Thoughts,’ comedian Tom Segura presents a variety of stories over the course of six episodes. Each follows a dark, satirical take on things that may or may not cross a person’s mind when they let their intrusive thoughts take over. One of the sketches follows the story of a country singer named Rex Henley whose best days seem to be behind him. Having tasted immense success, he is now on a downward spiral as he cannot seem to produce one good record. The desire to produce new music that will resonate with his audience leads him to do some very horrible things. Fortunately, none of the singers that we know of have done such things in real life. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Fictional Rex Henley Represents the Cruel Appetite for Fame and Success

In all of his sketches in ‘Bad Thoughts,’ Tom Segura reflects on human nature and its follies with different angles, but at the end of the day, all the stories and the characters remain entirely fictional. Rex Henley is one of them. Played by Segura, Rex is a faded country singer who has become too rich and successful to connect with his audience now. This has put him so out of touch with reality that he is making ridiculous songs now. It has put a great distance between him and his fans, so he decides to reconnect with them by kidnapping them and forcing them to live in a fake town of his making, where they remain prisoners until he can get material for his new songs.

While singers and celebrities are known to do all sorts of things to maintain their fame and success, so far, none is known for abducting their fans and holding them at gunpoint to get material for their songs or other stuff. Rex Henley is presented as an extremely exaggerated version of a singer who is desperate to find what the audience will connect to. His money and fame have disconnected him from reality, which has forced him to put his fans through hell. The situation is so dire that he has turned into a psychopath and isn’t beyond torturing and killing the people he says he wants to please.

When told to tap into a deep personal loss to evoke strong emotions that will feed his song, he shoots and kills the guard, who was actually a hired actor with whom he didn’t really have any personal or emotional connection. But his death gives him a fake sense of feelings that he was looking for, which leads him on a killing spree, for which he is never arrested, but which gives him all the material he would ever need to keep making songs that are hit with his ever-increasing fan base.