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Rise to Fame
Before Die Hard, Bruce Willis was the TV guy from Moonlighting, a weekly comedy-drama where he bantered with Cybill Shepherd and won a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Nobody was paying him to save buildings. Die Hard's producers were so uncertain about him that they hesitated putting his face on the marketing after the trailer landed cold. What worked was the concept: John McClane wasn't Rambo or the Terminator, just a New York cop in the wrong place. The film grossed over $140 million worldwide, Willis reportedly earned $5 million for it, and the guy whose face they didn't want on the poster became the poster.
In the Spotlight
The final decade of his career looked one way at the time and another way after. Willis appeared in more than 20 low-budget direct-to-VOD films in roughly four years, reportedly collecting around $2 million per two-day shoot. His eight films released in 2021 averaged 5% on Rotten Tomatoes. In March 2022, his family announced he was retiring due to aphasia. A year later, the diagnosis was updated: frontotemporal dementia. The volume of forgettable films made more sense in retrospect. Cognitive decline had been visible to directors and crew for years before that announcement.
Side Notes
During the Moonlighting years, Willis had a legitimate side career as a blues-pop recording artist under the alter ego Bruno. His 1987 album The Return of Bruno featured 'Respect Yourself' with the Pointer Sisters, which hit #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The promotional mockumentary was self-aware in a way his movie choices later were not. The childhood stutter he'd worked hard to overcome became a painful piece of context: his wife Emma Heming initially attributed the early speech changes to that same old pattern. It wasn't the same old pattern.