'I still love Demi with all my heart'

In the Die Hard movies

11 April 2012

It is quite a big deal going to interview Bruce Willis. It is for me, anyway, having spent most of the Eighties swooning as he sparred with Cybill Shepherd in the comic private-detective series Moonlighting. I'm late, and am forced to park my car about 400 miles from the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane where he is staying. I have to run, in my high, strappy sandals, and when I get to his suite, I notice that my feet, which were very well moisturised this morning in preparation for their big day, are now black. I can't meet Bruce Willis with dirty feet.

A huge bodyguard is seated outside his door. He lets me in, and while Bruce chats to his agent, I sneak into his bathroom. I run the bath, and stand in it. I use one of Bruce's towels. The bottom of my trousers are now soaked. Several minutes later, I emerge. Bruce is just standing there looking puzzled; I realise he must have heard me running the bath. But he is charming, and shows me to his couch, and exchanges a look with his agent that says, "I'll be okay, I'm a Hollywood tough guy."

He shakes my hand. His skin is very soft. His scalp is sprinkled with a light grey stubble, his body compact and meaty beneath skintight jeans and T-shirt. His arms are like Popeye's. The whole effect is spoilt rather by the fact that I think he is wearing foundation. His eyes are what do it for me, though: they are twinkly and, aside from the fact they keep trying not to look at my wet trousers, kind and soft. He's lovely.

He asks what I think of his new film, Hostage. He plays LAPD hostage negotiator Jeff Talley, who is so traumatised when he fails to rescue a kidnapped mother and her child, that he quits, taking his family to a small, crime-free town in

Ventura County where he downsizes to a job as an ordinary cop in a tight uniform. But, you guessed it, he is soon in the middle of a hostage situation that threatens his own wife and child. The film is well shot in a noirish way (directed by Florent Siri, who made the acclaimed French film The Nest), and has its moments of suspense, but the problem is Bruce Willis: he can do flippant and funny and he can smirk really, really well; but he can't do tortured. Which is strange, because his life, despite the fact he now commands more than $20 million a film, has been full of incredible sadness and adversity.

I lie and tell him I absolutely love the film, particularly the scenes between him and his teenage daughter, played by his daughter in real life, 16-year-old Rumer: she is a doppelgˆnger of her mother, Demi Moore. She plays a typical silent, moody teenager dressed in black who refuses to talk to her dad. Is that how their relationship is? "They are great girls," he says of Rumer, Scout, 13, and Tallulah, 11. "They have their moments, but I would have three more daughters tomorrow. I love them; I love being a dad. The film was her idea, but I told her I wasn't going to give her the part, she had to win it. So she auditioned and she did a great job."

Isn't he worried, though, that she is entering such a cut-throat profession where women have to be young and slim and beautiful, where her life will always be under a microscope? Her mother, having entered movies as a rather dumpy, flatchested, big-arsed actress in films like About Last Night, transformed her body, for a reported £200,000, into something even GQ wouldn't have to airbrush. Isn't she setting her daughters a bad example? He shakes his head.

'There is a lot of pressure for women to look a certain way. Of course it is different for men, look at Clint Eastwood. The women I know in show business call it a 'shorter shelf life'. But my daughters have had a good education about what Hollywood is. They know a lot and they are very smart. If they want to act then that's fine. They are pretty down-to-earth."

Boyfriends, though, are another matter. "Rumer has started dating and I tell her that is fine as long as she brings the boys round to the house first. And she says, 'Daddy, they're all scared to death of you. They go, he's Bruce Willis!' I told her that I'd be more worried if she didn't like boys. I just happen to remember what those 16-year-old boys are thinking. But I'm a pussycat really."

I remind him of the famous photograph taken at the premiere of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle of him, his ex-wife, the now 42-yearold Demi Moore, their three doeeyed daughters, and Demi's lover, the 27-year-old actor Ashton Kutcher. They look like one big happy family.

"But we are one big happy family," he says, exasperated. "We are all very cool about things. I'm really good friends with Ashton - we go on family holidays together. They came to my 49th birthday party together. Early on, when Demi and I broke up, we decided to put our kids first. It's hard to set aside the anger and resentment when a marriage falls apart, but when there are children involved you've got to put them before your own needs. I still love Demi, with all my heart, of course I do."

He looks sad. "Look, I'm from South Jersey, I'm the same guy I was 25 years ago. Men from South Jersey don't talk about their feelings, my dad certainly didn't. But I'm learning. I have a feminine side, I wouldn't say I'm a new man but I cook - I'm very good in the kitchen at breakfast time."

Demi Moore is obviously the love of his life. Their marriage seemed to be one of Hollywood's success stories, but after 13 years they divorced in 2000, with a very public battle over their £100 million fortune. He is reluctant to say who was to blame, merely citing intense tabloid interest for "not helping", and saying that where he was brought up "men wear the trousers" (he has admitted in the past that men are "pigs who think with their c**ks") - which can't have been easy with a woman as forthright and ambitious as Ms Moore, and that they get along better now than they did as a couple. Was there ever any competition between them? "Over our careers? No, I was very supportive."

The divorce was the most difficult thing he has ever been through. "When I was in the early stages of being separated I kept blaming myself, I couldn't believe it had happened to us. And I started talking to Will Smith, who is a very close friend, and he saved my life. He told me that, whatever you do, you have to put the kids first, and even if it's awkward you have to get together with the new girlfriend or spouse - whoever it is. It was just great advice.

"I don't understand men who bring children into the world and don't take responsibility for them. I think it's a crime. It is so damaging to that child to be deprived of having a father around. So wherever the girls are, that's where I live. We were living in Idaho and the girls sat us down about a year and a half ago and said, 'We don't want to live here any more, it's cold and it's boring! I said, 'Where do you want to live? New York?' And they said LA. So that's where we are. I hate LA, it's my leastfavourite city on earth."

He thinks he has been incredibly lucky. He could have been a welder like his father, David - "I come from a long line of mechanics." His parents divorced in 1971. After high school, where teachers said he was "flippant and disruptive", Bruce worked as a driver and night watchman, but after encouragement from his German-born mother, Marlene, he enrolled in college, where he discovered acting. He moved to New York and lived in a tenement apartment in Hell's Kitchen.

After years appearing off-Broadway, and studying under the legendary Stella Adler, he auditioned for the part of Madonna's boyfriend in Desperately Seeking Susan. He didn't get it. What he did get, though, beating 3,000 others, was the part of the wise-cracking David Addison in Moonlighting, which made him famous, and meant he was able to sleep with "lots of really beautiful women..."

"Moonlighting was like my PhD in acting. It was about the difficulty of doing a one-hour, two-character, onecamera show for five years; I had to learn 10 pages of dialogue every day. It was like a marriage contract you can't get out of." The huge success of the series led to the trio of Die Hard films, and critically acclaimed roles in Pulp Fiction and Sixth Sense. "I think people like me as a hero because I don't have extraordinary powers: I'm not superman, I'm just ordinary."

He is famously out of kilter with the liberal elite in Hollywood for his staunch Republican views. Bushes junior and senior are close friends. Of Bush junior he has said:"People make fun of the fact he sometimes misspeaks. Big f***ing deal!"

Does he ever see himself going into politics? He shakes his head, lighting a cigarette (he started the habit again while filming Hostage, and now can't seem to give up). "I have causes in my life that I feel strongly about. I believe we should take care of the elderly, children in foster care. I have zero tolerance for racial prejudice."

He says he managed to sit through only the first 20 minutes of Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. "It wasn't even a documentary," he says, huffing and puffing. "There was strong evidence that some of it was staged."

I wonder if the message in his new film - where a beautiful fortress of a house is invaded by opportunistic young thugs - is actually how he feels about America and the threat of terrorism. "There is real life and then there are films. I have always had a strong line about telling the difference between the two," he says.

HE admits the past few years have been tough. As well as dealing with his marriage break-up, he also lost his brother, Robert, in 2001 to pancreatic cancer, which made him "realise that I shouldn't take life for granted. Or put things off."

He has found it hard to fall in love with anyone since Demi; his most recent relationship was with the 27-year-old actress Brooke Burns (I remind him that their age difference was even greater than that between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; he smirks). Will he ever get married again? "I'm disillusioned with romance, love, marriage and all that. But I'm a romantic at heart and I believe anything's possible. We'll see."

Hostage opens nationwide this Friday.

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