The second Oscar nomination — thirteen years after the first — confirmed something that the career trajectory already suggested: that this was not an actor who had peaked at one moment and then declined into commercial work, but rather someone whose work remained at a high level across decades. The thirteen-year span between nominations, from 1996 to 2009, was not a period of artistic retreat but a period of sustained professional activity across a range of films and television, some of which attracted significant attention and some of which did not.
The Hunger Games franchise, which began in 2012 with The Hunger Games and extended through Mockingjay Part 2 in 2015, added a different dimension to his public presence: the dimension of massive commercial franchise success. Haymitch Abernathy — the former Games winner who serves as mentor to the franchise’s protagonists — gave him a role that was designed for complexity and delivered it. Haymitch’s alcoholism is not a comic device in the source novels; it is the legible consequence of what winning the Games actually does to a person, of what it means to be a child who survived by killing other children and then spent decades watching other children be sent into the same arena.
Harrelson played the character’s visible dysfunction with the specificity that good character acting requires: not the generic signifiers of screen alcoholism, but the particular quality of someone whose drinking is a highly functional coping mechanism rather than a simple loss of control. Haymitch functions. He helps Katniss and Peeta survive when the story requires him to, and his dysfunction is the shadow side of the specific survival intelligence that his winning of the Games required. It is a more interesting character than franchise films typically provide, and Harrelson played it as such.