Related to the Bruce Willis As “Bruce Willis” Cameo, but far more satisfying, is the Bruce Willis Character Actor Side Career. Rather than featured roles in ensembles like Death Becomes Her or Pulp Fiction, Willis sometimes pops up as a workaday supporting role, like the criminal dad in Alpha Dog, a fast-food exec in Fast Food Nation, or a military guy in Planet Terror. The best of these parts is Carl Roebuck, a contractor at odds with Sully (Paul Newman), the shiftless hero of Nobody’s Fool. For the most part, Willis is just playing a regular guy—and not in the relatable-everyman sense of the word. He’s not malicious enough to be the villain of the piece, yet not automatically sympathetic, either; he’s successful, he sees through Sully, and he’s a bit of a womanizing prick. Willis plays all of this stuff just right—as good in his own smaller-scale way, as Newman himself. It never feels as if you’re watching a scene where Paul Newman, legend, is squaring off with Bruce Willis, newer-generation movie star. They genuinely come across like two guys in a small upstate New York town. In a career full of unfussy performances, this is one of his most precise.

4. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Miramax/Everett Collection

John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman got the Academy Award nominations, and the biggest career boosts: Travlota, a massive comeback; Jackson, household-name status; Thurman, a bump from pretty starlet to frequent leading lady. But man: Willis is just astonishingly good in Pulp Fiction, too. (Maybe 1994, not 2012, was his greatest year; hell, North is terrible, but he’s awfully charming in it.) As Butch, the boxer who takes a bribe to throw a fight, reneges on the deal, and accidentally kills his opponent in the ring before going on the run, he comes across with surprising tenderness at first—a film-noir antihero pushed too far but redeemed by the love of a good woman (and his rapport with a weirdly seductive cab driver in the film’s most endlessly drawn-out scene). But when he realizes his wife Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) has forgotten to pack his father’s treasured watch for their escape, he flies into a terrifying rage that offers a glimpse of the demons he’s dealing with. (Writer-director Quentin Tarantino, always happy to toy with our emotions, also puts a comic button on the scene by having him softly apologize to Fabienne for his outburst, before cutting to Butch alone in his car, back to screaming and swearing up a storm.) Then, fittingly enough, Butch finds himself in hell. (Oh, and he kills the movie’s ostensible main character halfway through his story.) Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman all get bigger laughs, but when the movie needs its greatest streak of sustained tension, Willis is the professional Tarantino trusted.

3. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Niko Tavernise/Focus Features/Everett Collection