Sitting atop the A-list for decades now, Brad Pitt is one of the most famous and beloved stars in movie history. He’s played plenty of memorable characters, from the trigger-happy detective David Mills to the reverse-aging Benjamin Button to the Nazi-killing Apache leader Lt. Aldo Raine. Earlier this year, Pitt won his first Oscar for playing stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pitt’s performance as Cliff was unforgettable, and it just might be as iconic as his portrayal of Project Mayhem leader Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s Fight Club. So, here are five reasons why Cliff Booth is Brad Pitt’s best character, and five why it could still be Tyler Durden.
Cliff Is As Cool As Ice
A large part of Brad Pitt’s worldwide appeal is his coolness. He’s one of the coolest people who ever lived, and that coolness is universally translatable.
As one of the deadliest dudes in the world who picks fights with Bruce Lee and scales buildings like it’s nothing, Cliff Booth is as cool as ice.
Tyler Defined A Generation
Tyler Durden turned a whole generation of young people against banks and corporations. A lot of viewers missed the irony, with the film pointing out that society actually does need systems and rules or everything would collapse, but Tyler’s philosophical musings tapped into the cynicism and nihilism of Generation X.
Fight Club may not have been a traditional box office success, owing to a large budget and niche appeal, but it was certainly a cult hit among the Gen-Xers it spoke to.
Cliff Is Pitt’s Funniest Character
One of Brad Pitt’s most underutilized talents is his comedic chops. Whenever he gets a chance to play a funny character, like in Burn After Reading or Snatch, Pitt proves himself a master comic delivery and timing. Quentin Tarantino has always recognized this, and has given him ample opportunities to show it off (“Gorlami!”).
He even gave Pitt a comedic role to sink his teeth into in his script for True Romance, which may have been what alerted him to Pitt’s comic talents. Cliff has all the funniest lines in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (“It’s called manslaughter!”) and Pitt knocks every one of them out of the park.
Tyler Is Pitt’s Darkest Character
On the other side of the coin, while Cliff Booth is arguably Pitt’s funniest character, Tyler is his darkest. One of the great things about Brad Pitt as an A-list movie star is that he has a dark side that he’s not afraid to explore. The bleak ending of Se7en is reportedly what sold Pitt on the project, and he threatened to walk when the studio tried to brighten it up.
Roles like Gerry Lane in World War Z will paint Pitt as sickeningly likable, which makes the character feel bland and uncomplicated. With Tyler’s anarchic rhetoric and endorsement of terrorism (on top of the fact that he’s – spoiler alert! – a figment of the Narrator’s imagination), he is easily the darkest, most disturbing character that Pitt has played.
Cliff Isn’t Necessarily Likable, But He Is Fascinating
When Cliff is threatening the hippies on Spahn Ranch, he has a really sinister presence. When he’s beating them to death in Rick’s house while he trips on acid, he has a psychotic look in his eye. He also creeps on young women and he may have murdered his wife.
He’s still irresistibly charming – he is played by the charismatic Brad Pitt after all – but there’s an underlying mystery to Cliff that keeps him at arm’s length from the audience, emotionally, and Pitt digs deep into that.
Tyler Carries The Whole Movie
Whereas Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an ensemble piece that could still be held up by Rick Dalton, Sharon Tate, Marvin Schwarz, and Trudi Fraser if Cliff Booth was nowhere to be seen (although it would be missing about 80% of its fun), Tyler Durden is the backbone of Fight Club.
The success of Fight Club depends on the impeccable on-screen chemistry shared by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt as two wildly different sides of the same psychological coin.
Cliff Didn’t Need A Plot To Be Interesting
Apparently, when Quentin Tarantino had figured out who Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth were, he decided to scrap his original plan to put them into an Elmore Leonard-like crime story and instead just let the movie be a day in the life of these two guys.
Whereas Tyler acts as a component of a wider plot whose themes are bigger than any one character, Cliff drives his own movie. He didn’t need a plot backing him up to keep audiences on the hook.
Tyler Put Pitt On The Map
Before Fight Club, Brad Pitt was confined to sappy romantic roles in movies like Legends of the Fall, Meet Joe Black, and Interview with the Vampire.
The role of Tyler Durden was a turning point for Pitt, like when Matt Damon played Jason Bourne or when Leonardo DiCaprio started making movies with Martin Scorsese, and it opened the door to all kinds of roles.
Cliff Proved He’s Still Got It
Brad Pitt has been focusing on producing for the past few years, so 2019 saw him enjoy something of a comeback with leading roles in Ad Astra and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
While the former was an underappreciated gem, the latter was really the movie that told audiences Brad Pitt hasn’t lost it. He still has every ounce of the charm and talent he used to have, but with the added advantage of experience.
Tyler Seduces Us As Well As The Narrator
Tyler’s function in the plot of Fight Club is to represent the voice at the back of the Narrator’s mind, telling him to rebel against the system and do bad things. The way Tyler phrases things, they make a lot of sense. It’s hard to disagree with him.
The same goes for Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. You may not agree with his methods and find them a little too extreme, but you can’t really poke holes in the logic. Just like the Narrator, Tyler has us cheering for Project Mayhem.