The Hunger Games placed him alongside Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Liam Hemsworth in films that grossed billions of dollars combined and that constituted, in the 2010s, one of the defining cultural franchises of the young adult entertainment market. It was not the kind of work that attracted the critical attention of True Detective or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his 2017 film that earned him his third Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor. But it expanded his audience to include generations who had not grown up watching Cheers or Natural Born Killers and who encountered him first as Haymitch.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, directed by Martin McDonagh, is the film that may represent his most complete dramatic achievement in the latter portion of his career. He played Sheriff Bill Willoughby — a man who is simultaneously dying of cancer, navigating a town that is being torn apart by grief and anger, and trying to do right by everyone in his care while knowing that he cannot survive long enough to see the situation resolved. It is a performance built around the specific quality of a person who knows he is running out of time and is trying to spend what time remains as well as possible.
The film’s ensemble — Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson — was among the most praised of the year, and Harrelson’s specific contribution was praised for its warmth and its restraint: a character who could have been played as a simple foil to McDormand’s furious protagonist but who instead became the moral center of a film that resisted having one.