“It was thrilling”: the classic ’80s comedy that changed everything for Bruce Willis
As I’ve learned from many years of not opening letters that have ‘Important – urgent action required’ on them and only eating chips for vegetables because they taste better than lettuce, sometimes the best way to deal with something you don’t want to happen is to ignore it completely, and so that’s what I’m going to do about Bruce Willis, refusing to read the news and instead think of him as the ass-kicking, catchphrase toting, blowing stuff up legend he was in the late 1980s.
Either life was much better back then in general, or because I was only about ten and I had literally no responsibilities other than whether or not I’d brought my bike in, but seeing Willis casually flinging Alan Rickman off the top of towers in a sweaty blood-soaked white vest was certainly a thrill that you can’t replicate by reading about pints costing £12 and whether or not someone from Made in Chelsea is or isn’t scared about living in Dubai.
So instead lets pretend we are still living in those action-packed glory days, saying things like ‘Yippee-kay-ay motherfucker’ while paying £4 a litre for petrol. Back then, Hollywood was ruled by three muscle-bound action heroes: Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, consistently making ‘turn off your brain and enjoy’ popcorn spectacles that made billions at the box office, when they weren’t opening up ill-advised restaurant franchises.
And 1988’s Die Hard was probably the best of those, a classic ‘man on the street gets dragged into an explosive crisis and sorts it all out by shooting people in the face and getting home in time for Christmas’ affair, Willis crawling around air ducts in very much on fire tower buildings and becoming a proper Hollywood star in the process.
But while the rest of the world wasn’t quite au fait with Willis’s shaved head and cigarettes before that point, his fame had been steadily growing in his homeland for some years thanks to his being cast in the network TV comedy Moonlighting in 1985, a show co-starring Cybill Shepherd in which the pair played private detectives in Los Angeles solving cases that would run for four years, earning 40 Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe win for each of the leads.
Prior to the show, Willis had been in New York, bartending while looking for acting jobs, failing one audition to appear with Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. He had little money and lived in a small apartment in a rough area of the city before he was invited by a girlfriend to fly out to LA for a visit. While there, his agent back in New York arranged for him to do two auditions, one for the cop comedy Police Academy, which he didn’t get and the other for Moonlighting, which he did.
He recalled the change in his life once he got the part, saying: “It was thrilling. Television makes you really famous.”
But adding: “I still haven’t recovered from it. I don’t think I handled it very well, the first few years. I was 29. I wasn’t equipped for it and there’s nothing that prepares you for it.”
Eventually, in 1989, Moonlighting was cancelled after ratings began to slip; the two leads were tiring of the roles, Shepherd because she had new twins and Willis because Die Hard had become a global smash, and he wanted to make more movies. Which he did, over 100 of them in fact.
