Two years ago, Bruce Willis was on a movie set when he startled crew members when he accidentally fired off a revolver loaded with a blank - yet not understanding what was going on.
It has been revealed that the action movie superstar is battling cognitive issues due to frontotemporal dementia.
He had produced 22 "Geezer-Teaser" movies in the three years before his retirement; however, witnesses who saw how his condition deteriorated have come forward with their stories.
Bruce Willis Misfiring a Gun
Since his first film role in 1970, Bruce Willis has been in over 70 movies.
Unfortunately, due to a language-altering illness, he was forced to step away from acting in 2022.
During his last few years in show business, reports indicated that the 64-year-old actor would often need someone to read lines to him through an earpiece, and he could only work for four hours a day max on set with body doubles being utilized for action scenes involving fake weapons due to misfires during filming.
2022 Movie, 'White Elephant'
On the set of "White Elephant," Bruce Willis showed apparent signs of slowly worsening confusion. Many questioned why he was even involved, as he asked his team, "I know why you're here, and I know why you're here, but why am I here?"
Jesse V. Johnson had worked with the "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" actor decades before when the latter was still a stuntman; now directing the movie, Jesse knew something had changed with him over time.
He asked about Bruce's condition to his team and found that they wanted to conclude shooting before lunchtime to let him go home early.
"It was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered."
"We were all a little uneasy about how Bruce Willis was being handled," one of the crew members told the Los Angeles Times. "We'd give him instructions but he simply didn't understand what we wanted from him."
This led to Jesse ultimately announcing that the team had decided not to work with Bruce again following their experience on the movie set.
He stated, "Despite us all being fans, the arrangement felt wrong and was a rather depressing conclusion for his career - something none of us wanted to take part in."
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Bruce Willis' Can't Say His Lines
In June 2020, the outlet reported on an email the director, Michael Burns sent to the screenwriter of the action thriller "Out of Death."
The email was alarmingly titled, "It looks like we need to knock down Bruce's page count by about 5 pages." Consequently, Burns suggested abbreviating Bruce's dialogue to avoid monologues.
This message sparked a growing concern for the actor's well-being among those on set with him.
Michael himself noted that after one day of working with Bruce, he could tell that "there was a bigger issue at stake here and why I had been asked to shorten his lines."
He further revealed having no choice but to condense all of Bruce's scenes and around 25 pages of dialogue into a single-day shoot.
First Misfired Gun On Bruce Willis' Movie Set
For the 2020 film "Hard Kill," Bruce Willis was cast as a protective father to actress Lala Kent's character.
Lala described her character's reaction when her on-screen dad appeared: "I'm supposed to think my life is about to end, and then my dad steps into save the day."
On the set, Bruce reportedly pulled out a gun for a scene without warning toward his on-screen daughter.
She remarked that it wasn't an issue during the first take, but it happened again without notice during the next one. Ultimately, "Hard Kill" was released in August 2020, with Willis only appearing for seven minutes of screen time.
