Heartthrob, Hero, Closet Intellectual: The Many Faces of Bruce Willis

Samuel L. Jackson still remembers the priceless piece of career advice that Bruce Willis gave him when they were shooting Die Hard With a Vengeance in 1994. “He told me, ‘Hopefully you’ll be able to find a character that, when you make bad movies and they don’t make any money, you can always go back to this character everybody loves,” Jackson recalls. “He said, ‘Arnold’s got Terminator. Sylvester’s got Rocky, Rambo. I’ve got John McClane.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it didn’t occur to me until I got that Nick Fury role—and I had a nine-picture deal to be Nick Fury—that, Oh, I’m doing what Bruce said. I’ve got this character now.”

The strategy he shared with Jackson worked for both of them; Willis’s decades-long commercial success was duly noted, then and now. Yet Willis is less often praised for the work he did in between his blockbusters, the movies (some bad, many quite good) that didn’t make money, but were indicative of the tremendous risks he took over the course of his long career.

The actor, who turns 70 on March 19, has maneuvered that career with a dexterity and intelligence that’s often been difficult to appreciate over the sonic boom of his giant blockbuster hits. It’s the kind of long-term strategy that only becomes clear in retrospect, when taking stock of who an actor is and what they’ve accomplished. Willis’s 2022 retirement from acting, following his diagnosis of aphasia (a language disorder that affects spoken and written communication) and, later, frontotemporal dementia (an umbrella term for brain diseases associated with personality, behavior, and language), gave the actor’s many fans and admirers the opportunity to reexamine and re-appreciate his gifts. Though Willis is no longer squarely in the public eye, he is still very much with us—surrounded by love and care—and we’re thankfully still able to applaud and elevate him.

Willis himself has always understood that great work often takes time to reveal itself. “I don’t believe that anything that gets said about films when they come out really has any meaning or longevity anyway,” he said in 1994. “It’s only 10, 15 years down the road you look back and you say, ‘This film really holds up; this film doesn’t hold up,’ you know?” The action tentpoles and big-budget vehicles with his name above the title certainly hold up: the Die Hard franchise, Armageddon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Fifth Element are all still ubiquitous in popular culture, revisited and celebrated as pure, thrilling popcorn cinema.

But Willis’s primary aim was nothing as simple as movie stardom. “I never expected to become this famous,” he explained in 1990. “I wanted to be successful as an actor; I never equated that [with being] famous and having your life story in every newspaper in the country. I just never thought that far ahead. And I don’t who does.”

Willis became a movie star in an altogether unusual, and at that time, all but unprecedented way. Our go-to impression of Willis as a gun-toting action hero was itself a reinvention. “First of all, he’s a terrific actor, which people don’t talk about,” notes Glenn Gordon Caron. He cast Willis, then an unknown stage actor, in the mid-1980s detective comedy series Moonlighting, the role that made Willis a pop culture sensation.

His casting in the original 1988 Die Hard was controversial, because Willis was (a) a television actor in an era where TV and film performers tended to stay in their respective lanes, and (b) a comic actor known for wisecracks and witty banter, not for shooting guns and leaping off buildings. (There were reports of cynical audiences giggling when he popped up in the picture’s first trailers.) But as a working-class guy from Jersey, Willis was used to being underestimated. He turned those expectations inside out, a pattern he would continue to follow in the passing years—all while his considerable range and adventurous impulses were often ignored by critics and the entertainment press alike.

“I think that he’s basically underrated because he was a big box-office star. So that immediately works against you,” says Bonnie Bedelia, his costar in the first two Die Hard movies. “I think, in his mind, he always wanted to be an actor and to do interesting work. That’s why becoming famous for such a huge, boffo movie was not expected from him. But once he was there, it was kind of like, you know, ‘I’m an actor.’ And I don’t think he saw, in terms of the work, a lot of difference between them. One was not more important than the other, because he was getting to work with interesting directors, with interesting scripts.”

There are miles of road between the grizzled action heroes that became Willis’s trademark and the rest of his filmography: the wounded protagonists of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable; the wide-eyed time traveler of 12 Monkeys; the melancholy small-town lawman of Moonrise Kingdom; the sensitive lover with a mean right hook in Pulp Fiction. Even his too-rare comic roles were played in wildly varying keys, from the slapstick nebbish of Death Becomes Her to the cool-as-a-cucumber hired killer of The Whole Nine Yards to the uptight yuppie of The Kid.

Even within traditional action roles like Sin City and Looper, Willis would find grace notes of weariness and regret. His work in Die Hard would prove revolutionary for introducing a vulnerability to the action-hero paradigm in the middle of the Stallone/Schwarzenegger era. You could imagine one of those actors executing Die Hard’s intricate action set pieces—but you could not imagine them picking shards of glass from their bare feet while tearfully dictating an apology to their estranged spouse.

“I like to keep challenging myself,” Willis said on that film’s promotional tour. “I like to keep forcing myself to do new things. And one of the scary things about that is you have the opportunity to fail when you try new things. But it’s the only thing I can do, you know, to continue to grow as an actor.”

To continue to grow as an actor, Willis would seek out notable collaborators—both legends of the medium and promising up-and-comers—who were well outside the realm of popcorn movies. “The other thing about Bruce that people do not know and do not appreciate is that he was a closet intellectual,” Caron says. “First of all, a voracious reader. I remember he turned me on to Preston Sturges. And I considered myself somebody who was very conversant. But he would call me and say, ‘Have you seen The Palm Beach Story?’”

Willis would frequently use his status as a bankable star to get challenging projects both made and seen. His first move after finishing Die Hard was to take a supporting role in the Vietnam drama In Country for the great director Norman Jewison. He starred in The Sixth Sense when no one knew who M. Night Shyamalan even was. The visionary but often troublemaking director Terry Gilliam has acknowledged that Willis’s involvement was what got him the greenlight for 12 Monkeys. He teamed up twice with cinephile fave Alan Rudolph, and collaborated with the likes of Brian De Palma, Walter Hill, Blake Edwards, and Edward Zwick; he made unbilled cameo appearances for Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Linklater.

Willis was so impressed by Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Pulp Fiction that he was willing to take any role in it just to be involved. Hot off that film’s considerable success, he took a supporting role in the low-key comedy-drama Nobody’s Fool and didn’t even take an onscreen credit; Willis just wanted to work opposite Paul Newman. He made millions on the Die Hard movies, but on Nobody’s Fool, Pulp Fiction, In Country, and many others, he accepted significant pay cuts so his involvement wouldn’t break their low budgets.

“I called Bruce and said…‘There’s no money here,’” recalled Nobody’s Fool director Robert Benton in 1995. “I said, ‘We’re all doing this picture on the lowest possible budget.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll have a good time.’

“You can count the number of actors who do that on the fingers of one hand,” Benton continued. “I think the great thing about Bruce is that if your material interests him, he doesn’t care what the money is.”

Willis never received an Academy Award nomination for his acting, even when he gave acclaimed performances in well-regarded pictures. But it’s telling that the actors he worked opposite in those films so frequently did: Newman in Nobody’s Fool; Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys; Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette in The Sixth Sense; John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. They were not acting by themselves, but awards-giving bodies were seemingly blinded by Willis’s celebrity—or perhaps he simply refused to dominate those films, ceding the spotlight to his costars while approaching his work with the modesty of a journeyman. “I can look back on all the films that I’ve done and hold my head up,” he said in 1994. “Films don’t always work, for a number of reasons, but I work as hard as I can and try and be interesting, and try to do new things.”

And so, on this milestone birthday, let us approach and appreciate Bruce Willis on his own terms. He was always interesting; he was always charismatic; he was always trying new things, boosting new voices, lending his celebrity and stardom to projects that might have gone unmade or unseen otherwise. He’s led the life of a movie star, but with the searching spirit of a true artist. When asked if he’d ever wondered why he was plucked out from obscurity for such a charmed life, Willis answered thoughtfully, “Yeah, all the time. I haven’t really come up with much of an answer—other than, I’ve just been blessed by God. I get to do what I want for a living, I get to work with my favorite actors and my favorite directors, and I don’t really have an answer for why it happened to me. I just remain thankful, and I have a lot of gratitude for how my life has turned out.”