Pitt goes for the goofball gusto early in “12 Monkeys,” particularly in his first scene where he shows Willis around the asylum (this capital-a acting display likely earned him the Oscar nomination). When Willis catches up with Goines six years after his release, he’s still a cockeyed weirdo, only now he’s playing the role of dutiful son. It is, however, an act, and, in an interview with The New York Times, Pitt confessed that he stumbled in trying to convey this deception:

“I nailed the first half of ’12 Monkeys.’ I got the second half all wrong. That performance bothered me because there was a trap in the writing. It’s not the writing’s fault, but it was something that I couldn’t figure out. I knew in the second half of the film I was playing the gimmick of what was real in the first half — until the last scene — and it bugged the [expletive] out of me.”