How the vest was won

One could never accuse Bruce Willis of putting on airs and graces. When I walk into his suite at the Mandarin Hotel, he jumps to his feet with a “Hey, how you doing?” and plenty of chit-chat about the kinds of cheeseburgers he likes.
On a day when he’s meeting, oh, about a gazillion members of the press corps, he takes the trouble to learn my name and even waves the PR girl away when our time runs out. What a gent! Within minutes it feels less like I’m interviewing a celebrity than a particularly charming handyman who’ll be coming around to do a few jobs next Tuesday.
Then again, like his namesake Mr. Springsteen, those blue-collar mannerisms have always been part of the appeal. Back in mid-’80s, when he auditioned for Moonlighting, the wisecracking detective series that would make him a household name, ABC executives would reject him 11 times because he looked like a builder. Finally, one female executive, realising how well his snarky everyman would bounce off Cybil Shepherd’s highly strung sophisticate, settled the issue by speculating that he’d make one “dangerous fuck”.
There are, it must be said, plenty of ladies we could ask for confirmation. Since the amicable dissolution of his marriage to Demi Moore, the 52-year-old has been romantically linked to Courtney Love, Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry and, most recently, Lindsay Lohan. Actually, today he seems rather keen to strike that last name from the record.
“I never laid a hand on that girl,” he says categorically. “You know, the people in your business are always coming up with what-if scenarios. That’s alright. It’s part of the job. But I’m not in the what-if business. She’s a sweet kid and a talented actress, but she’s my daughter’s age, you know?”
Fair enough. Like many Americans of his generation, Bruce Willis was born an army brat to parents stationed in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany. In 1957, when young Bruce was two, the family relocated to New Jersey. As a kid he developed a stutter but he soon discovered that the handicap disappeared whenever he was clowning for an audience. Inevitably, this led to a stint in stand-up comedy, but at 18, he steeled his impeccably working-class credentials by taking a job in the DuPont Chamber Works factory. He left, shaken, after a colleague was killed on the job, to gig with his harmonica and work as a security guard.
That sense of a sweet-hearted sentiment beneath a decidedly gruf
f exterior would set him apart from the pack and not long after taking a night-class in acting, he landed his first screen role in Brian G. Hutton’s The First Deadly Sin, starring Frank Sinatra. Small roles in classy flicks like Sydney Lumet’s The Verdict, but his big screen career didn’t ignite in earnest until, mid-Moonlighting, producer Joel Silver allowed the actor to wise-ass and ad-lib his way through a carnival of explosions in the 1988 smash Die Hard.
One of the few stars of the small screen to translate effortlessly into box-office receipts, his film career proper, like his big TV break, almost didn’t come to pass,
“I only did the first Die Hard film because Cybil Shepherd was pregnant,” he shrugs with a touch of incredulity. “There was an 11-week window so I went off and shot it. And then I went back to work on Moonlighting. Now in TV you can’t swear at all, so I was just really happy to get a movie where I was allowed to say cocksucker over and over. Then I got a letter from my aunt in the Bible belt when it came out. Oh man, did she let me have it.”
The film would spawn its own sub-genre. In addition to sequels, there were imitators – Under Siege was Die Hard on a boat, Speed was Die Hard on a bus – while cleaned-up television versions would make “Yippee-ki-yay maggot-farmer,” the bastardised phrase of choice among keen ironists.
Like his progenitor, Die Hard’s good cop protagonist had bags of charisma and the common touch. And unlike the other muscle-bound action heroes of the Reagan years, John McClane was a guy who said ‘ouch’. He got his shirt dirty. He walked over broken glass. He never let a moment pass without reminding the audience of his reluctance to assume the mantle of hero.
“This kid named Jason Smilovic wrote Lucky Number Slevin,” says Bruce. “And he came up with the idea and the phrase ‘the mythology of Die Hard’ – and part of the mythology of Die Hard is that John McClane loves his country, loves his family, that he’s not going to let anybody hurt anyone that can’t really defend themselves.”
In the wake of Die Hard, the power to command seven figure paydays led to many a misstep. Appearances in The Bonfire Of The Vanities, The Colour Of Night, Look Who’s Talking 2 and Hudson Hawk, alarmed critics and paying punters alike. Meanwhile, wild stories pertaining to Bruce and his wife Demi’s lavish lifestyle filled up gossip column inches. As the couple demanded jet plane rides between jobs in Hollywood and their home in Idaho, wags dubbed her “Gimme” Moore. Bruce, however, insists that they were just trying to be good parents to their three daughters Rumer Glenn Willis (born 1988), Scout LaRue Willis (1991) and Tallulah Belle Willis (1994).
“They grew up in a real Hollywood family but they weren’t raised there,” he says. “So they really got to see the illusion of Hollywood and what’s real and what’s bullshit and I think they handle it really well now.”
He and Moore divorced in 2000, but until she became involved with Aston Kutcher rumours persisted that she and Willis would remarry. The pair remain close, and Willis has frequently stated that he regards young Mr. Kutcher as part of the extended family. Still, there must have been a time when he felt everything was going to seed.
“Yeah,” he nods. “But I’m a believer that stuff happens because it’s supposed to happen to you. Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you turns out to be the best thing that happens to you.”
Bruce Willis was never going to stay down for long. Over the years he has proved every bit as adept at reinvention as his colleague Governor Swartzenegger. He’s been knocking around with Quentin Tarantino since Pulp Fiction and has worked with Robert Rodriguez twice (Sin City, Grindhouse). He scored one of his biggest box-office hits when he took a chance on an unknown M. Night Shyamalan by taking the lead in The Sixth Sense. Unlike his old Planet Hollywood partner, Sylvester Stallone, there was no need for Bruce to reinvent himself by getting back to basics. We’re pretty lucky then that he decided the time was right for the splendidly entertaining Die Hard 4.0.
Still, 12 years have passed since Mr. Willis shot Die Hard With A Vengeance, the third instalment in the franchise, alongside his good mate Sam Jackson. Why now? Is this part of a broader return for the retrosexuals of the high octane ‘80s?
“I don’t know if it’s because any of us sat down and said now is the time for these action films to come back,” he smiles. “For us it was a weird combination of elements and meetings and my daughter Scout saying, ‘I’ve just seen this movie Underworld and it’s so good’. And that was about four days before Fox had me meet Len Wiseman (director of Underworld and Underworld: Evolution) for Die Hard 4. Personally, after Die Hard With A Vengeance – or as I like to call it ‘Thank God for Sam Jackson and Jeremy Irons’ – I wanted to take a break from action films until the genre reinvented itself. That sounded like a really smart thing to say at the time though I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Then I met Len and understood that he had a vision to bring the franchise into the 21st century, but still keep it real with real smash-mouth stuff and real stunts, just like the sort you’d see in the late ‘80s.”
Though many internet speculators were weary when it was announced that Die Hard 4.0 would see McClane take on internet terrorists, they need not have worried. Wisely, whenever we’re looking at a computer screen, there’s an explosion or car-crash or near-death experience lurking around in the background.
“I’m not going to kid you,” he says. “I can’t bounce off the concrete like I used to. I’ve done plenty of films where I’ve had to get in shape just for vanity. If you read a script and on page 87 you’ve got to take your shirt off then you better believe I’ll be in the gym the next day. Nobody wants to see Bruce Willis the fat-ass take his shirt off. But with this film I was working to survive, not look pretty. I had to make sure my bones wouldn’t shatter. In one scene I wound up with an injury from a ceramic cat. I’m a lazy guy. I hate to work out. I only do it for work. There were a couple of weeks when from my hip to my ankle was black and blue.”
Testosterone junkies may also be interested to learn that Die Hard 4.0 marks the first occasion where McClane get his ass kicked by a girl (the very foxy Maggie Q).
“That was bananas,” he says. “I’ve never fought a woman in a film before. I’ve never got my ass kicked by a woman in a film before. I couldn’t hit a woman, never have, never will, so it was an odd thing for me. And let me tell you, I gave Maggie my best right and she still got up. She destroyed me.”
Further feminine notes are provided by Mary Elizabeth Winstead who plays McClane’s college-aged daughter, Lucy, a character who finds herself being stalked by an overprotective daddy. As the father of three teenage girls, I wonder if that was drawn from real life experience?
“Oh I don’t have to,” he assures me. “Demi and I have loaded those girls up with information about the world and self-esteem. They know that young women have a right to speak their minds and have an opinion on anything. Then I come along and tell them what those 16-year-old guys are really thinking.”
So has Mr. Willis, like McClane softened over the years? Die Hard 4.0 certainly suggests as much. Those attending in the hope of hearing a demotic stream of profanities may be disappointed to learn that the film has received a family-friendly 15A certificate.
“We’re going through a weird downswing in the United States right now,” he says. “We’re going through a parochial time. I don’t know if people are watching the news out there, but in LA any minute now you could be sent to word rehab. You know, say the wrong word and off you go. But you know, it’ll change. It’ll come back around. You know we never shot for a rating. We shot it as an R-rating. It was afterwards that it got tidied up. But I still think it’s the best film since the first one.”
This apparent distaste for the dread PC police is entirely in keeping with Mr. Willis’s political persuasion. As one of Hollywood’s rare Republicans, he has been accused of all manner of intemperate outbursts. One story had it that he offered a million dollars for the head of Saddam Hussein. Another said he wants the US to invade Columbia to end drug trafficking.
The truth is rather more sedate. He may be of a red stripe, but he has recently praised celebrity Democrat George Clooney for his work in Darfur and teamed up with Susan Sarandon for a campaign to improve the lot of Gulf War veterans. He is, he says, quite simply “a small government guy” and was extremely keen that the terrorist threat in Die Hard 4.0 should come from within rather than without.
“In the first three films there’s terrorism everywhere,” he says. “There’s terrorism on the beach. There’s terrorism in the clouds. Pre 9/11 it was just total fantasy. But right after that a lot of action movies were cancelled. Everything got shelved. It was a bit of a task to do another film with terrorists that would not offend or dishonour those who were affected by 9/11. So was a unique spin to have the United States attacked from the inside by someone who knows the system really well.”
An old-school guy in every sense, he recently received what he believes is the greatest honour of his career.
“I got to play a session with the Allman Brothers band,” he says giddily. “And then I got a call from Greg Allman last week asking if I wanted to sit in again. That was like the biggest thrill of my life.”
In an existence marked by explosions and gunfire and car chases, it’s gratifying to know that all Bruce Willis really wants is to rock out. Good show.

Die Hard 4.0 is released July 4.