The Tragic Decline of Bruce Willis: From misfiring guns on set to asking crewmembers 'why am I here'
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Bruce Willis, who is retiring from acting due to cognitive issues brought on by aphasia, startled crew members on the set of a movie two years ago when he accidentally shot a revolver loaded with a blank, and perplexedly asked people what he was doing on the set.
The 67-year-old Hollywood legend has now been diagnosed to be suffering from frontotemporal dementia. In the three years before his retirement, Willis produced 22 'Geezer-Teaser' films, but witnesses who saw how he was becoming a liability are now speaking out.
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Bruce Willis allegedly misfired guns while filming
The action hero allegedly misfired guns while filming, and he would frequently need someone to read him his lines through an earpiece as his symptoms grew worse. Since he began performing in the 1970s, Willis has been in more than 70 films. The 'Die Hard' actor quit acting in 2022 as he started to battle the illness that was causing his language skills to deteriorate.
In the last few years, his management made sure that Willis' film shoots only lasted a maximum of two days, of which he would often only work for four hours due to his deteriorating health. A body double was used in most action scenes, particularly those that involved the use of prop guns, the LA Times reported.
White Elephant (2022): 'He was just being puppeted'
In the set of 'White Elephant', it was evident that Willis' slowly deteriorating condition was making him appear confused rather frequently. He outright questioned his actions while working on the impending low-budget movie. Two crew members recall him asking, "I know why you're here, and I know why you're here, but why am I here?"
Jesse V. Johnson, who worked with the actor decades ago when Willis was still a stuntman, was directing the movie. On the new set, he recalled, "It was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered." When he asked Willis's team about his condition, "They stated that he was happy to be there, but that it would be best if we could finish shooting him by lunch and let him go early," Johnson recalled.
"It was less of an annoyance and more like, 'How do we not make Bruce look bad?'" one crew member told the LA Times. "Someone would give him a line and he didn't understand what it meant. He was just being puppeted." "After our experience on 'White Elephant,' it was decided as a team that we would not do another," Johnson said. "We are all Bruce Willis fans, and the arrangement felt wrong and ultimately a rather sad end to an incredible career, one that none of us felt comfortable with," he added.
Out of Death (2021): Airtime cut down and not allowed any monologues
Mike Burns, who directed Willis in the action thriller 'Out of Death,' sent the movie’s screenwriter an alarming email in June 2020, writing, 'It looks like we need to knock down Bruce's page count by about 5 pages," the LA Times reported. "We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues, etc.," he added, according to the paper. Nearly two dozen people who were on set with the actor expressed concern about his well-being.
"After the first day of working with Bruce, I could see it firsthand and I realized that there was a bigger issue at stake here and why I had been asked to shorten his lines," said Burns. The director said he was forced to cut all of Willis- scenes and about 25 pages of dialogue, into a single-day shoot.
Hard Kill (2020): 'Misfired' a gun twice on set
In 2020, a second gun incident happened on the set of 'Hard Kill', which was supposed to feature Willis' character defending actress Lala Kent, who was playing his daughter. "I'm supposed to think my life is about to end, and then my dad steps in to save the day," Kent said. Willis was supposed to say something to signal her to duck before he shot a gun, but the report claims that he did so without saying anything. "Because my back was to him, I wasn’t aware of what was happening behind me. But the first time, it was like, 'No big deal, let’s reset,'" she said. But the same thing happened again in the next take.
'Hard Kill' came out in August 2020 and Willis appears for just 7 minutes in the movie.