If you’ve been keeping an eye on cinema for the last year, something very weird has been going on. We’ve seen almost a dozen direct to video films with Bruce Willis where he had increasingly insignificant parts to play. Some movies even showed him having an earpiece where his role didn’t require one. There was rampant speculation about his health and finally his family came out and confirmed that he does in fact suffer from aphasia and is stepping down from acting.
Aphasia is a disease where the language centers of the brain are affected. The most common ways how this show is that a person either has difficulty “pulling” words out of their memory or that the recollection of words is still intact but the person has difficulty attaching a meaning to them. It’s not clear which form Bruce Willis has, but it’s clear that this can be a bit of a problem for an actor.
The fact that Bruce had an earpiece in on some movies probably points toward him having difficulty recalling the words, so someone would feed his lines to him through the earpiece to keep the words fresh in his mind. This is of course all speculation and it’s not anyone’s business but Bruce’s what type of aphasia he has and how serious it is. People from the industry have been coming out and saying that Bruce had been visibly suffering from something for several years now.
And now Bruce has finished his career with a big stream of “geezer teasers,” as they’re called. Basically they’re a moniker for bad movies where they attach a big name to it to create at least some market value. None of them have been particularly good and thankfully for Bruce’s legacy none of them are memorable either. We’ll all have forgotten about those movies in a few years.
The main movies we’ll remember Bruce by are always going to be Die Hard, 12 Monkeys, the Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction and so many others. No matter what Bruce has been up to the last few years to create some financial stability for himself and his family, his legacy as an actor will always remain intact and we hope he gets the best care in the world to help him deal with his aphasia without losing himself entirely.
