Bruce Willis collaborators share previous worries about actor
Recently announcing that he will be retiring from the entertainment business, the iconic screen actor Bruce Willis revealed that the Hollywood star has aphasia, a language disorder caused by brain damage.
Following this announcement, many of the star’s recent collaborators have voiced their concerns about working with the actor in recent years, witnessing first-hand the dramatic effects of the condition on his mental state. Often forgetting his lines, Mike Burns, the director of Out of Death, told the Los Angeles Times that he was forced to reduce the actor’s dialogue scenes in the 2021 film.
“It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about five pages…We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues,” the director wrote in an email dated June 2020.
Meanwhile, Jesse V. Johnson, the director of the forthcoming action movie White Elephant, also reported, “It was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered…After our experience on White Elephant, it was decided as a team that we would not do another,” Johnson recalled. Continuing, he added, “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”.
Having enjoyed 42 years in the industry spotlight, Bruce Willis has become an icon of American cinema, becoming most well known for his 1988 action movie Die Hard, where he stars as the maverick cop John McClane.
In addition, Willis is also well-known for his role in the ensemble cast of Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino, where he stars alongside the likes of John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Christopher Walken.
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