The roles Bruce Willis regrets turning down the most: “Another bad choice”
Over the course of one year, Bruce Willis went from being a television actor with a non-existent film career to one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars. After rising to prominence as a witty detective in the series Moonlighting, he struggled to find his footing in movies, especially after making his debut in the poorly received 1987 rom-com Blind Date. When producers started developing a little film called Die Hard, he was far down the list of contenders for the role of John McClane. When everyone from Clint Eastwood to Richard Gere turned down the movie, however, he got his big break.
As a wisecracking cop who is the lone line of defence against a terrorist organization threatening to bomb an LA skyscraper, Willis was full of charm and swagger. The success or failure of the movie lay on his untested shoulders, and he passed that test with flying colours. His performance was so successful, in fact, that it came back to haunt him. Decades later, he was still being offered similar roles. He took a lot of them (including a seemingly unending number of Die Hard sequels), but he also turned down countless others.
Perhaps it was this flurry of shamelessly derivative scripts that led him to make several huge mistakes. Within all those offers, there were two that he dismissed outright that he came to bitterly regret – a 1990 box office smash and a star-studded heist movie. In a 2007 interview with Ain’t it Cool News, he said, “I wish I had not turned down the part that Patrick Swayze eventually played in Ghost. I simply could not see how a romance between a ghost and a living person would work.”
This is, to be fair, a very reasonable conclusion. Jerry Zucker’s tearjerker really shouldn’t have worked, but its mixture of tragedy, romance, and the supernatural proved to be a winning formula. Starring Willis’ then-wife, Demi Moore, as an artist who gets a second shot at love with her murdered boyfriend (Swayze), Ghost became an unexpected hit and the highest-grossing film of the year.
Willis had another reason to regret turning it down. “It would have been nice to have worked with Demi again,” he said. “I liked that film.”
The other movie he wished he hadn’t passed over was Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans 11. He had been offered the part of the slimy casino owner Terry Benedict, but didn’t see the potential for the role. “I wanted to work with George Clooney, and thought I might only have one shot at doing it,” he explained, “And when I read the script, the [role] wasn’t finished yet, so I passed on it. Another bad choice.” Still, he had high praise for Andy Garcia, who ultimately played the part.
Just as it’s impossible to imagine Clint Eastwood or Richard Gere playing John McClane, it’s hard to imagine an alternate world in which Willis took the places of Swayze in Ghost or Garcia in Ocean’s 11. There is something vulnerable about Swayze’s performance that the Die Hard star never showed on screen, and something nauseatingly self-important and corporate about Garcia’s performance that Willis never really showed as an actor. He might have been typecast from early in his career, but he sure played the action hero well.
