The iconic action movie Bruce Willis turned down: “Thank god I didn’t do that one”
You probably know Bruce Willis as the guy from 1998’s Die Hard. John McClane is the renegade cop who blows stuff up and stops terrorists and billionaires with a monomania for making money and satisfying their fetish to kill people in the process. John McClane is the guy with a catchphrase that cannot reasonably be printed when the algorithm is breathing down your neck.
But if you’ve never seen it or had the misfortune to be present at a party where people have a loathsome debate about whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie, maybe you’ve seen him as the detective in 1997’s screwball sci-fi film, The Fifth Element, or as David Dunn, the hero of M Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable, a progenitor of the modern superhero film. Not all of his roles have been visceral action films, populated by more people without a pulse than with one, but it has been definitional to his career.
So it may come as a surprise to hear that his girlfriend was uncomfortable with one film in particular via this EW interview. “I remember right around that time, the script for Lethal Weapon came across my path and my girlfriend at the time read it and said it was way too violent. Thank God I didn’t do that one!”
1987’s Lethal Weapon is a cop movie, sure. And it has its fair share of violence and death, as does (almost) everything in the genre. But it was written by an absurdly young 22-year-old Shane Black and is encoded with the sardonic humour and quiet moments of human sentiment that would come to define him as a writer and filmmaker. It’s curious that Bruce Willis’ girlfriend was squeamish about the script.
Lethal Weapon stars Mel Gibson as a military veteran, now working as a homicide detective, who’s become unstable with PTSD. We didn’t know it at the time, but it seems perfect for Gibson. But, typical for any workplace environment, his boss thinks he’s faking it. He’s partnered with Roger Murtaugh, played by Danny Glover, who is just too old, too tired, too fond of another catchphrase that cannot be printed. It’s a presage to the ‘Buddy Cop’ genre, if not its originator. Depending on who you ask.
Bruce Willis has certainly made films that are more upsetting to the general viewer than Lethal Weapon. Granted, at the time, he was known for the sitcom Moonlighting, which mostly consisted of playful banter between himself and Cybill Shepherd. But it was shot simultaneously with the first Die Hard, so it’s anyone’s guess why that was off-limits for Willis.
After all, he went on to do 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s time travel film that’s more disturbing than any cop movie ever made, and Sin City which is merely more disturbing than most cop movies ever made. Willis, it would seem, would soften over time, or perhaps his girlfriend just eased up.
