LOS ANGELES — Just days before Bruce Willis was scheduled to turn up on the set of one of his latest action films, the director of the project sent out an urgent request: Make the movie star’s part smaller.
“It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about 5 pages,” Mike Burns, the director of “Out of Death,” wrote in a June 2020 email to the film’s screenwriter. “We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues, etc.”
Burns did not outline one of the reasons why Willis’ lines needed to be kept “short and sweet.” But on Wednesday, the public learned what he and many other filmmakers have privately been concerned about for years: The 67-year-old’s family said he will retire from acting because he has aphasia. The cognitive disorder affects a person’s ability to communicate and often develops in individuals who have suffered strokes.
