Bruce Willis had already built a career as an action hero by 1994, but the role that reminded everyone he could actually act almost went to someone else entirely.
Pulp Fiction hit theaters in 1994, and Willis played Butch Coolidge, an aging boxer caught up in mob business after refusing to throw a fight. The part was originally offered to Mickey Rourke, and Matt Dillon reportedly turned it down as well, before director Quentin Tarantino landed on Willis instead. Willis’s own casting came about somewhat by chance, too. Producer Lawrence Bender has said it was actor Harvey Keitel, who’d starred in Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, who first introduced Tarantino to Willis.
The film wove together several interconnected crime stories, following hitmen John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, gangster’s wife Uma Thurman, and Willis’s Butch, all set against Tarantino’s now-signature non-linear structure and rapid-fire dialogue. It was a bold swing for its time, and critics ate it up. Pulp Fiction currently holds a 92% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside a 96% audience score, cementing it as one of the most acclaimed films of the decade.
The accolades haven’t slowed down since. Collider has called it the greatest crime movie ever made, and Entertainment Weekly once dubbed it the best film released since 1983. It also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and took home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, beating out steep competition that year.
For Willis, the film marked a turning point. After a string of box office misfires like Hudson Hawk and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Pulp Fiction reestablished him as a serious actor, not just an action star, and helped kick off the broader indie film boom of the 1990s. More than three decades later, it’s still the film most likely to come up when people talk about Willis’s best work, action franchises included.
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