“I have worked for little or no money”: Bruce Willis’ most overlooked performances
Becoming one of the highest-paid movie stars in Hollywood doesn’t tend to happen to untried, untested, or unproven actors, but Bruce Willis wasted very little time taking his place on top of the pile when he was plucked from television and parachuted into an instant classic.
Best known for his role opposite Sybill Shepherd on Moonlighting, Willis lucked out big time when virtually every major leading man in the industry turned down the chance to headline John McTiernan’s high-concept action movie Die Hard.
It was only his third time being credited in a feature, just his second time taking top billing, and it was released less than three months after the first. If anything, his $5 million salary turned out to be a bargain when Die Hard thrived at the box office, changed the face of action cinema, made John McClane an icon, and gave rise to a billion-dollar franchise.
From that point on, Willis very rarely worked for pennies. He pocketed eight-figure paydays for the Die Hard sequels, Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing, Michael Bay’s Armageddon, and forgotten sci-fi Surrogates, while M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense rewarded him with one of the single biggest financial rewards in cinema history when his contract stipulated that he was entitled to a share of the profits.
Willis was one of the biggest names in the business and a staple of box office-busting actioners for decades, but he’d always wanted to test himself as a background player. The downside was that because he’d become an overnight sensation on screens big and small, those opportunities didn’t come around very often.
“I never went through the phase of playing supporting roles, so I have a lot of fun doing them now,” he told David Sheff. “I’ve done a lot of films in the past couple of years just because I wanted to do them. I have worked for little or no money. I’ve done it because I like to act, and I don’t always want to be the big cheese up on the screen.”
To be more specific, Willis highlighted the 1994 dramedy Nobody’s Fool, where he took third billing behind Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy, as “a good example because it is such a simple movie.” Also making the cut was the 1991 crime biopic Billy Bathgate, a film that listed him fourth in the credits behind Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and Loren Dean.
He did cite Pulp Fiction as another example, though, but nobody would suggest the era-defining movie – or his work in it – was overlooked when he was the biggest name in the ensemble, but on a monetary scale it was certainly one of the smallest things he’d worked on for a long time.
However, he did use it as a neat segue to point towards Four Rooms, where he spent two days on set playing an uncredited part in Tarantino’s ‘The Man from Hollywood’ segment. He was a star first and foremost, but by his own admission, Willis was just as happy barely making a cent and letting others take the spotlight.
