Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bruce Willis’s wife has just hit Hulu.
I guess Emma Hemming Willis has also written a book about being a caregiver.
The biggest revelation: Bruce, who suffers from such bad dementia that it’s unclear he recognizes her, no longer lives with Heming and their two daughters. She tells Sawyer she’s bough a second home where Bruce is attended by aides.
That’s pretty shocking. Heming doesn’t say exactly where Bruce is, only that she and his daughters see him often. So the situation must be pretty dire if he can’t be under the same roof. (Just for contrast, I know an Alzheimer’s patient in New York living with his wife in a one bedroom apartment.)
The Diane Sawyer interview raises more questions than it answers. As I wrote three years ago, Bruce’s problems began in 2015 when he was replaced by Steve Carell in Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” after a week because he couldn’t memorize his lines. He was getting ready for starring on Broadway in “Misery,” which he did, using an earpiece to have those lines read to him.
Sawyer doesn’t ask anything about Willis’s career. He was once the top box office star in the country. From “Moonlighting” through “Die Hard,” and “The Sixth Sense,” Willis was on top of Hollywood. He was famously married to another huge star, Demi Moore. He was prominently featured with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the launch of Planet Hollywood.
But around the time of his initial decline he started making ‘B’ movies, straight to video schlock in which he worked a day or so, and rarely had dialogue. The films were edited together to make it look like he was the star, but it was really his name being used to sell garbage.
It wasn’t like this column and other writers didn’t notice what was happening. But in the end, a whopping 19 of these movies were made over 7 years, not one of them with any value. It seemed like Bruce was being exploited and no one did anything to stop it. The last one, called “Hostage,” from 2023, got a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Two of them had ratings of zero (0) and many had no reviews at all.
In reality, Willis didn’t make a decent film after “Moonrise Kingdom” in 2012. As late as 2019 he appeared featured in “Glass,” although most of the time his back to the camera and he’s seen in a cloak. It’s also clear that in 2019’s “Motherless Brooklyn,” he’s being used for marquee name value only.
Meantime, see below, Bruce made more and more strange talk show appearances in which he barely spoke, had to be coached by the host, or the whole thing had to be a pre-taped sketch using a stunt double. Believe me, everyone around him knew something was wrong.
So what is really going on here? And what happened to Stephen Eads, who was Bruce’s producing partner on at least 30 films and accompanied him everywhere he went like a minder? Didn’t he notice something was wrong?
As I wrote in the 2022 story, when I ran into Bruce backstage at a Steve Tyler concert in 2016, with Eads, he already seemed very confused and uncertain — and this was before “Misery.” In the summer of 2015, I also saw him at the East Hampton premiere of “Rock the Kasbah,” one of director Barry Levinson’s rare failures in which Willis seemed to be lost.
So what is really going on here? Sawyer doesn’t even scratch the surface, or seem to care. Better not to ask questions and just get the interview.
