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Thomas "Tommy" Miller is the main antagonist of the 2004 science fiction thriller film The Butterfly Effect. He is the son of George Miller and the older brother of Kayleigh Miller and the archenemy of Evan Treborn.
He was portrayed by William Lee Scott.
Biography[]
At first, Tommy in a flashback was a young child sitting in the dark corner of his basement with an eerie, emotionless expression on his face while twisting the head off a doll. He tells his father that he wants to be in his "home movie" with his sister, but George tells him that he wants Evan to be in it. George turns out to be a pedophile who forces Kayleigh and Evan to perform in homemade child pornography.
A couple years later, Tommy is 14 years old, as he, Kayleigh, Evan, and their friend Lenny sneak out and place a dynamite into a mailbox, unexpectedly, the homeowners; a mother and her infant arrive and open the mailbox just as the dynamite went off. The kids flee in horror and Tommy pressures the others to not speak of the incident.
Sometime later, the kids go to a movie theater playing the movie Se7en. Tommy is furious when he sees Evan and Kayleigh kiss (it is implied that he harbors incestuous feelings towards his sister and hates Evan), and he then takes out his anger on a teenager who tripped him, brutally assaulting him with a pole. As he is then ushered out of the theater, he is shown smiling with sadistic glee.
Later, Tommy kidnaps Evan's dog, ties it in a sack, and pours gasoline on it, intending to burn it alive. As Evan, Kayleigh, and Lenny try to stop him, he viciously attacks them with a piece of plywood and knocks them unconscious before proceeding to burn the dog to death.
In one alternate timeline we find out that Tommy was institutionalized, but later escaped from the institution as an adult. He then confronts Evan while he and Kayleigh are at college and attacks him with a baseball bat. Evan manages to take the bat from him and eventually beats him to death in self-defense.
Evan travels back in time to try and get Tommy to become a better person. In one timeline, he is successful, but he is left without limbs, as Lenny had been forced by Tommy to plant dynamite in a mailbox which had caused the death of a woman and her baby, and Evan took the dynamite but it exploded and his limbs had to be amputated. In this timeline, Tommy is a devout Christian who devotes his time to helping the less fortunate.
In another timeline, we find out the reason why Tommy is such a psychopath. His father, in addition to molesting him and his sister, beat him on a regular basis. Evan goes back to the moment where Tommy tries to burn his dog to death, but this time, he convinces him not to do it. Unfortunately, Lenny stabs Tommy to death with a shard of metal because he was traumatized by Tommy telling him that he would kill his mother if he didn't plant the dynamite in the mailbox.
In the end, Evan goes back to the day he first met Kayleigh and is intentionally cruel to her so that she and Tommy will move away with their mother and escape their father's abuse.
Alternate ending[]
In the director's cut ending, Evan instead of going back to the day he first meets Kayleigh, goes back to the day of his own birth. While in his mom's womb he strangles himself with the umbilical cord, making it to where he was never born. Thereby erasing all of the influence he had on anyone's life, especially Kayleigh and Tommy's. The montage sequence showcasing their lives is the same in the theatrical ending except they all play in full. The last thing we see of Tommy is him giving a graduation speech at his and his sister's high school graduation. The movie ends with Kayleigh getting married and living a happy life.