Bruce Willis’ favourite book: “It was great escapism”
If anyone ever made a Mount Rushmore of great action heroes, Bruce Willis’ face would almost certainly be carved in stone. As the quick-thinking, sharp-tongued, shoe-shunning John McClane, he shook the genre to its core with the first Die Hard, before eventually becoming a parody of himself in some of the later entries. He also branched out into more science fiction-themed romps and a raft of ‘geri-action’ flicks in his later years.
The granite-jawed icon has also pursued other, more cultured ventres. He appeared in one of Wes Anderson’s most acclaimed movies, Moonrise Kingdom, and also starred in adaptations of both Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Clearly, when he’s not polishing his pistols, Willis loves nothing more than to thumb through a good novel.
GQ asked him about this in an interview in 2013, before Willis’ career was ended by a form of dementia. The publication discussed a number of things with the star, including the prospect of retiring, which is extremely bittersweet in hindsight. When asked what his favourite book was, he replied with an unexpected answer, but framed in a very ‘Bruce Willis’ kind of way.
“Maybe The Hobbit,” he said. “That guy has created his own little religion, his own little world. And I think it was great escapism. I just went back and read it again. I always said that it would make a great film. But no film can live up to the images you have in your head when you’re 16 or 17 years old and caught up in the noble actions of the characters.”
When asked if he needed books to comfort him at that age, Willis replied, “It was something I could do by myself.”
‘That guy’ that Willis so off-handedly referred to is, of course, JRR Tolkien, the most important fantasy author of all time. He published The Hobbit in 1937, having initially written it as a story for his old children. This tale of dwarves, dragons, and a curiously small being named Bilbo Baggins took the world by storm. It is one of the best-selling books of all time and inspired Tolkein to write more stories set in the world of ‘Middle Earth’. The rest, as they say, is history.
Willis’ comments about saying that The Hobbit ‘would’ make a good film are confusing, as the first of Peter Jackson’s trilogy inspired by the book had already been released. Subtitled An Unexpected Journey, the movie, which starred Martin Freeman as the reluctant burglar, followed the story up to the party’s first encounter with Azog the Defiler. This character actually doesn’t appear in the original book; one of the many details added to pad the story out. Two more ‘Hobbit’ films followed, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies. The movies aren’t bad or anything, but they failed to live up to the expectations set by Jackson’s previous ventures. Turns out Willis was bang on the money.
Given his body of work, you wouldn’t expect someone like Brucey to be a fan of a high fantasy book written for children. He is a man of many contradictions, and we all love him for it.
