When Bruce Willis became a television star 40 years ago via the hit ABC comedy “Moonlighting,” no one in the entertainment industry thought he was primed to become the next great action movie hero. As wisecracking private detective David Addison, he seemed poised to be a romantic comedy lead in the old-fashioned vein of Cary Grant or, at the very least, a rakish successor to Paul Newman. He did not, however, give off the gun-toting beefcake vibes of guys like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. So when he snared a then-unthinkable $5 million payday to star in “Die Hard” after just about every star in Hollywood passed on the role of John McClane, a folly appeared to be in the offing.
All Willis did with “Die Hard” is completely readjust the industry’s expectations for action films. Instead of a musclebound killing machine, he was an everyman cop who uses his wits as much as his facility with firearms to take down a band of heavily armed thieves. Moviegoers were hooked on this newfangled approach to action filmmaking, but the industry looked to replicate the form of “Die Hard” rather than its humanity. While clones like “Under Siege,” “Passenger 57,” and “Speed” began to proliferate, Willis gamely returned for two “Die Hard” sequels and, to keep his red-meat-craving fans sated, sought out gruff-and-quippy riffs on the McClane persona. Some of these were great (“The Last Boy Scout”), and some were “Striking Distance.”
Ultimately, after a decade-plus of bullet-whizzing derring-do, Willis took a break from the genre. What caused him to temporarily turn his back on the types of films that made him a movie star?