TAKING CARE

Bruce Willis’ Wife Reveals How He Worked Despite Dementia

The actor’s wife Emma said a trusted team got creative behind the scenes to help the action star deliver a performance.

Bruce Willis’ wife and caregiver, Emma Hemming Willis, reveals that the actor found a way to temporarily keep working as the symptoms of his frontotemporal dementia (FTD) intensified. Willis announced that he had been diagnosed with the degenerative disease in February 2023, and has since stepped out of the public eye—save for social media updates from his family. In a forthcoming book titled The Unexpected Journey, Emma writes that the actor had a trusted team to feed him acting lines through a receiver behind the scenes and had his dialogue in films cut down to seamlessly accommodate his diminishing capacity. The results can be noticed in such films as Assassin (2023) and the Detective Knight series (2022-23), according to the book, which Emma has called “not a memoir, but under the category of self-help.” In an Instagram post, Emma said the book is what she wishes “someone had handed me the day we got our diagnosis with no hope, no direction. She added, “Today life looks different for me and our family because I was able to put support into place.”