Bruce Willis’ wife, Emma Heming Willis, is breaking her silence - and our hearts - with a raw, unflinching look at the actor’s final years on film sets as he quietly battled cognitive decline.
In her upcoming book, The Unexpected Journey (out September 9, 2025), Emma shares never-before-told details about the extraordinary measures taken to help Bruce continue acting while symptoms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) slowly took hold behind the scenes.
The goal: let Bruce do what he loved, and protect his dignity in the process.
According to The Daily Beast, Emma reveals that directors quietly shortened Bruce’s lines, and a trusted friend was brought in to feed him dialogue through an earpiece during filming. These off-camera adaptations helped Bruce finish projects like Assassin (2023) and the Detective Knight trilogy (2022–2023) without alerting the public to his deteriorating condition.
Bruce’s diagnosis first became public in 2022 when his family announced he was dealing with aphasia, a language disorder.
By early 2023, it was confirmed he had frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain disease that affects speech, cognition, and behavior. The Die Hard icon officially retired from acting that year.
In the book and on Instagram, Emma, 46, explains she wrote The Unexpected Journey not as a memoir, but as a guide for other families navigating similar heartbreak.
“I really wrote the book that I wish someone had handed me the day we got our diagnosis with no hope, no direction… not much,” she said. “This isn’t a memoir, it’s a self-help guide for caregivers, written to hold space for our heartbreak and our healing.”
Emma and Bruce married in 2009 and share two young daughters, Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, ten. Bruce also co-parents three adult daughters with ex-wife Demi Moore: Rumer, 36, Scout, 32, and Tallulah, 30. In a recent interview, Rumer told Extra TV that her dad is “doing great,” adding: “He’s really good.”
But behind the scenes, the signs were there, long before the public knew.
A 2022 Los Angeles Times investigation revealed the extent of Bruce’s struggles on set in the years leading up to his retirement. Between 2019 and 2022, he appeared in 22 low-budget action films, sometimes called “geezer teasers”, where insiders say his confusion was impossible to ignore.
Crew members recalled Bruce misfiring prop guns, missing lines, and frequently asking why he was even on set. Bang Showbiz detailed how actress Lala Kent described a scene on Hard Kill where Bruce misfired twice, prompting her to ask the director to intervene. Others reported similar moments, though some close collaborators, including producer Randall Emmett, later denied the incidents.
On White Elephant, director Jesse V. Johnson - who had known Bruce since his stuntman days - said he was stunned by the change. “It was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered," Johnson said, adding that he was instructed to shoot all of Bruce’s scenes before lunch to avoid fatigue.
As the disease progressed, Bruce relied more on stunt doubles and worked shorter days, typically just four hours. He was often limited to two shooting days per project.
By the time he filmed American Siege in 2020, Bruce was wearing an earpiece, a subtle but telling sign of what was to come.
His final projects included Paradise City, where director Chuck Russell praised his effort, saying Bruce “brought his A-game,” per the Daily Mail. Others, like White Elephant production supervisor Terri Martin, offered a more sobering view: “He just looked so lost… He always tried his best.”
Bruce Willis, once Hollywood’s quintessential action hero, is now retired. From Die Hard and The Sixth Sense to Unbreakable and 12 Monkeys, he built a legendary career spanning decades, and remained committed to it until he physically couldn’t anymore.
Now, his family - especially Emma - are sharing his story to help others through one of life’s most difficult journeys. And in doing so, they’re showing the world what real strength looks like.