Why Bruce Willis will always be a Hollywood trailblazer

The action star announced last week that he is stepping away from acting owing to ill health

Bruce Willis in 'Die Hard' (1988). IMDB

Bruce Willis, left, and Brad Pitt in 'Twelve Monkeys'. Photo: Universal Studios

Bruce Willis, left, and Samuel L Jackson in 'Unbreakable'. Photo: Touchstone Pictures

Bruce Willis in a scene from the film 'Glass'. Photo: Universal Pictures

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, right, in action thriller 'Looper'. Photo: TriStar Pictures

Willis in a scene from 'Pulp Fiction'. Photo: Miramax

The actor in a scene from 'Breakfast of Champions'. Photo: Warner Bros.

Bruce stars in 'Motherless Brooklyn'. Photo: Warner Bros

Bruce Willis plays Captain Sharp in Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom'.

Bruce Willis in 'Sixth Sense'. Photo: Spyglass Entertainment

Last week brought the tremendously sad news that Bruce Willis is stepping away from acting owing to health issues. Recently diagnosed with aphasia, a condition that affects cognitive abilities, it emerged that the star, aged 67, has been struggling with learning his lines and reacting to cues.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, Mike Burns, who directed Willis in the 2021 crime thriller Out of Death, was asked to reduce the star’s dialogue to lighten his workload.

The admission evoked an outpouring of sympathy online for Willis, as fans expressed their love for the actor whose career spans back to the 1980s. Back then, his breakthrough came as David Addison, the wise-cracking private detective, in TV’s comedy-romance Moonlighting. The show ran for five seasons, winning Willis an Emmy. By the time it wound up in 1989, Willis was a bona fide movie star — largely thanks to his role in Die Hard.

Even now, it’s hard to quantify the enormous impact Willis made in Die Hard as John McClane, the vest-wearing cop who single-handedly takes down a criminal gang raiding his wife’s workplace on Christmas Eve. Compared to the muscle-bound tanks such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Willis was more grounded, more vulnerable. When he picked broken shards of glass from his feet, you felt every wince, every cry of pain. Here was a reluctant hero we could all relate to.

Willis played McClane a further four times, with diminishing returns, but here remained a character who changed action movies for ever. When you look at stars such as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson or Ryan Reynolds now — who boast similar everyman qualities — you can see the template that Willis first engineered. Like McClane, Willis was also a born survivor — even early '90s box office bombs such as Hudson Hawk and The Bonfire of the Vanities were not enough to derail his career.

He had no protective movie-star ego about wanting to look like an action star. He completely dove into this character

Rian Johnson,
director

Indeed, for all the smooth-talking schtick, Willis possessed a brilliant ability to reinvent his persona with edgy filmmakers — risks that paid off spectacularly. His role as the prize fighter Butch in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction remains one of his most memorable parts; one minute he’s cooing softly to his girlfriend and promising her blueberry pancakes, the next he’s gunning down John Travolta’s hitman Vincent Vega in his own apartment and singing about “Captain Kangaroo”.

Perhaps even better was his turn in Terry Gilliam’s time-travel masterpiece 12 Monkeys, which came a year later in 1995. He plays James Cole, the sanity-threatened prisoner sent back from the future to stop a viral apocalypse. Gilliam wasn’t a big fan of Willis’. “I hated the Trumpian mouth he does in films,” the director later recalled, demanding that Willis dial down the smirking, a go-to staple for the actor. He did, with masterful results.

Others will doubtless point to M Night Shyamalan’s twisty supernatural tale The Sixth Sense, another huge hit in Willis’ career, in which he plays, with real conviction, a child psychologist who connects with Haley Joel Osment’s troubled boy Cole.

Yet, the same year — 1999 — Willis was also acting for the esteemed Alan Rudolph in his Kurt Vonnegut Jr adaptation Breakfast of Champions, as car dealership owner Dwayne Hoover. It didn’t quite land, but once again showed Willis’ penchant for gambling.

This continued into the 2000s, albeit less frequently. He found work with Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation), Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom) and Rian Johnson (Looper), directors who sculpted Willis’ movie-star persona into something interesting; unique. In Anderson’s case, he saw Willis at his most tender, as a police officer leading a search party for some runaways, in this nostalgic look at a bygone America. The New York Times rightly praised it as a “wonderful” performance.

Ever better, sci-fi Looper had Johnson tap into Willis’ stock-in-trade: “He’s typically the hero who is going to find the right person and kill them and save the day,” the director told me. Only this time, in a wild inversion, his time-travelling assassin discovers that his target is his younger self.

“He had no protective movie-star ego about wanting to look like an action star,” said Johnson. “He completely dove into this character.”

Recently, Willis’s career was reduced to generic B movies, such as Fortress and American Siege, producers banking on his movie-star charisma to sell their titles to the video-on-demand market, regardless of quality. The Golden Raspberry Awards even created a one-off category called ‘Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie’, nominating him eight times, which rather spoke to the volume of films he was churning out.

The Razzies rescinded the award, which went to his turn in Cosmic Sin, upon hearing of his diagnoses. Yet even in these fallow years, Willis found some gems — notably Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton’s 1950s-set detective yarn, and M Night Shyamalan’s Glass, which had Willis reprise his character from 2000’s Unbreakable — a superhero-style project that arrived long before they’d become fashionable.

That's Willis all over: a Hollywood trailblazer.

Best-dressed men at the Oscars 2022 — in pictures:

Actor Will Smith attends the 94th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, in suit and tie. AFP

Riz Ahmed, wearing an oversized burgundy suit. EPA

'Dune' actor Timothee Chalamet wearing Louis Vuitton but no shirt on Oscars night. Getty

Actor Rami Malek brings Prada to the red carpet. AFP

Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee turns convention on its head with baby-blue Bottega Veneta. AFP

Actor Jason Momoa wears a black tuxedo and shirt to the Academy Awards. EPA

Daniel Kaluuya, star of The Judas and The Black Messiah, brings contrasts in teal satin Gucci. EPA

Actor Bill Murray in a Dior suit and a beret. AP

Andrew Garfield, a 2017 Academy Award nominee, wears claret velvet Saint Laurent. EPA

Actor and producer David Oyelowo wears a bold yellow-and-black floral suit. AFP

Bradley Cooper, accompanied by his mother Gloria Campano, wears a Gucci tuxedo. Reuters

'Dune' actor Josh Brolin wears a black tuxedo. Getty

American television host Karamo Brown wears Brunello Cucinelli. AFP

Oscar-nominated writer and director Pawo Choyning Dorji wears traditional Bhutanese dress. AFP

Actor Wesley Snipes goes head-to-toe burgundy. Reuters

Actor and director Tyler Perry wears a white tie and a Ukraine ribbon. EPA

'Belfast' actor Jamie Dornan on the red carpet in Valentino. EPA

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal wears a bow tie-less navy tuxedo. AFP

Canadian actor and Marvel movie star Simu Liu wears a red tuxedo. Getty

Elliot Page, a 2008 Academy Awards nominee, wears Gucci. AFP

Oscar winner Sir Kenneth Branagh wears a navy three-piece suit. EPA

Actor Ciaran Hinds wears navy Brunello Cucinelli. AFP

Actor Jay Ellis wears a white tuxedo. AFP

Musician and TV star Travis Barker wears black Maison Margiela. AFP

'Dune' director Denis Villeneuve wears a white tuxedo jacket. AFP

'Belfast' star Jude Hill wears a Thom Browne tuxedo. Reuters

Colombian singer Sebastian Yatra wears a pink tuxedo. AFP

Australian actor Jacob Elordi in a classic black tux. AFP

Canadian singer Shawn Mendes wears a classic black tuxedo. AFP

Spanish actor Javier Bardem on the red carpet. Getty

Actor Woody Harrelson goes head-to-toe black. AFP

Olympian and pro snowboarder Shaun White wears a classic black tuxedo. AFP