His performance as Willoughby was the pivot around which that moral complication turned. The character needed to be genuinely good — genuinely likeable, genuinely worthy of sympathy — without being a refutation of Mildred’s anger. Both things had to be true simultaneously: Willoughby was a man doing his best, and Mildred’s fury was legitimate. The performance held that tension by playing Willoughby as fully human: someone who is tired and sick and doing the work in front of him with as much care and honesty as he can, without pretending that his care and honesty are sufficient to resolve Mildred’s grief.
The third Oscar nomination — for Best Supporting Actor — completed a picture of an actor whose most significant work spans more than two decades, in a range of roles that consistently resist the obvious. The three nominated performances are remarkably different from each other: Larry Flynt, a pornographer who became a First Amendment champion; Captain Stone in The Messenger, a soldier whose professional function requires emotional restraint; and Chief Willoughby, a man of genuine moral decency who is dying. The range is not performed variety — the kind of deliberate diversity that actors sometimes pursue as a career strategy — but rather a pattern of choices that reflects genuine responsiveness to interesting material.
The nomination also made him, at the time of the 2018 ceremony, one of the small group of actors who have received three or more Academy Award nominations across different decades of their careers. This is a specific category of achievement, distinct from winning, that measures sustained excellence across time rather than the peak achievement of a single year. The members of that category are the actors whose careers the Academy has consistently recognized as among the most significant of their era.