Bruce Willis’s brain is “failing him” and his “language is going”, his wife, Emma Heming Willis, has revealed, more than two years since the actor was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
“Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall, you know,” Heming Willis told Diane Sawyer in an ABC special on Tuesday. “It’s just his brain that is failing him. The language is going. We’ve learned to adapt and we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a different way.”
In 2022, Willis’s family announced that the Die Hard and Sixth Sense movie star would be retiring from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia – a brain disorder that leads to difficulty with language or speech.
“For someone who was very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet and, when the family would get together, he would just melt a little bit,” Heming Willis told ABC of her husband’s early symptoms.
“He felt a little removed, a little cold, not like Bruce who was very warm and very affectionate. To go the complete opposite of that was alarming and scary.”
A year after his aphasia diagnosis, Willis received another diagnosis for frontotemporal dementia. “While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” Willis’s family said at the time in a joint statement including his daughters, his wife, and his ex-wife, Demi Moore.
When Heming Willis first learned the diagnosis, “I was so panicked and I just remembering hearing it and not hearing anything else,” she said. “It was like I was freefalling.”
Heming Willis said there are still times where her husband – now 70 – reveals a “spark” of his buoyant personality.
“We still get those days,” she told Sawyer. “Not days, but moments. It’s his laugh. He has such a hearty laugh. And sometimes you’ll get that twinkle in his eye or that spark. And I just get transported. It’s just hard to see because as quickly as those moments appear, then it goes.”
Heming Willis and Willis married in 2009 and have two daughters together. Her book about caring for Willis – titled Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope and Yourself on the Caregiving Path – will be published on 9 September.