The ‘Die Hard’ movie that tricked Bruce Willis into being funny: “He did it reluctantly”
There’s barely an action hero to have hit the screen in the last half a century who doesn’t drop at least one quip, and that becomes increasingly true should the character return for sequels. Bruce Willis played John McClane five times, and during that period, he wasn’t lacking in zingers to dispense.
The actor helped change the genre forever when he debuted in John McTiernan’s Die Hard, which rewrote the rulebook for the entire medium. The days of vascular monstrosities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were numbered, and the everyman was suddenly back in fashion.
Willis redefined the action protagonist forever thanks to what would soon become his signature combination of charm, charisma, and world-weariness, all delivered with a twinkle in the eye. If that sounds hyperbolic, then consider just how many Die Hard clones continue to roll off the Hollywood production line on an annual basis.
Die Hard was a fairly serious film, albeit one with plenty of levity. It didn’t wink at the audience, and none of the gags felt forced, but because it worked once, the studio was either confident or adamant that it would work again. When Willis returned for the Renny Harlin-directed sequel, he put his foot down and demanded that McClane operate as a grounded character who wouldn’t look out of place in a hard-hitting drama if it wasn’t for all the bullets and explosions.
That wasn’t what the studio wanted, nor was it Harlin’s preferred way to make the film. A compromise was reached in a roundabout way, which saw the actor grudgingly shoot one light-hearted take of many scenes, and there are no prizes for guessing which ones were used in the final cut.
“The outcome was that Bruce agreed to do as many takes as he wanted of the way he wanted to do it, and then we’d do one take the way I wanted to do it, with humour,” Harlin told Empire. “He did it reluctantly and not so happily, but he did it. And in the end, every single funny moment that could be caught – even a smile he might have flashed before he realised the cameras were rolling – was cut into the movie.”
Even though he’d effectively tricked Willis into giving a more comedically inclined performance despite his objections, the studio still wasn’t happy. An executive asked Harlin if there was any chance he could make McClane – and Die Hard 2, in general – funnier, to which the filmmaker replied that he’d “used everything I had.”
They were never supposed to be sombre and solemn movies, but Willis may have been left to regret his decision to grant his director one solitary humourous take when those were the only ones that managed to survive the cutting room floor and make it into the final cut of the sequel.
