Bruce Willis: No Kidding

His future looks just as solidly booked. He will star in a film called Hudson Hawk, a sort of '90s Topkapi or To Catch a Thief, from an idea he had, possibly to co-star Isabella Rossellini. And there is more. He owns the rights to two Elmore Leonard novels, Bandits and Killshot, both of which he plans to make. And he is writing a screenplay called Color Line, which is about racism and about which he is feeling particularly passionate.

"How in a modern world can there exist things like apartheid, like two million white guys telling thirty million blacks that we rule this country and you don't have a say?" says Willis excitedly. "Get 'em out of there. Give 'em an island."

He puts his napkin on the coffee table and lies back down on the couch. On a table nearby is a jar of bubbles and next to it is a slot machine. Twenty quarters if you hit the jackpot. But he is in no mood to be amused, or to be amusing.

"They exterminated fifteen million American Indians in less than a hundred years in this country and you don't hear a peep about that because we've got the land now." Willis makes a growling sound. "Oh, it gets me nuts," he says.

For most actors, the struggle to make it is an arduous hike up a not very dependable ladder. But since Willis blew into town, he seems never to have missed a rung. After auditioning for Desperately Seeking Susan, and not getting the part, he flew out to the Coast and was sent over to the "Moonlighting" people who, after seeing 3,000 David Addisons, were down to their last 15. Willis was blase.

"I knew I had the goods to get an acting job," he says. "I also knew that if it wasn't the job with Glenn Caron, that it would be a job with somebody else."

From out of nowhere, Willis, co-star Cybill Shepherd and their delightfully off-the-wall "Moonlighting" escapades created a stir, providing television with some of the most innovative programming ever seen. And then, just as quickly, the show fell apart. "I think 'Moonlighting' ended in the episode where they had just slept together," Willis says. "For what the show originally was, was them not fucking. As soon as we did that, we knew it would change. It just died a little death then."

The show struggled on for two more seasons, sinking at times to the nearly unwatchable. "It became a burden just to show up," Willis recalls. "I really felt like the desire to act was almost ground out of me. I was very depressed. I felt like I couldn't even open my mouth to say the words anymore, to crack the wisecracks I'd been doing for four years in a row. And I was carrying a much bigger weight than that. It was like the whole country was watching to see what was going on more behind the scenes than what was going on on the show."

Sometimes what was going on behind the scenes was more interesting. At least there was a bit of drama concerning the off-screen lives of Willis and Shepherd. For Willis, it probably culminated the night the police (and two police helicopters, in a sort of prequel to Die Hard) swooped down on his Nichols Canyon home after the neighbors got sick of his loud music. More than two years later, Willis remains angry and unrepentant. "I still don't think I did anything wrong," he says. "I don't think there's a law against enjoying yourself. The only mistake I made was moving into a neighborhood where the houses were three feet apart."

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