Samuel L. Jackson still remembers the priceless piece of career advice that Bruce Willis gave him when they were shooting Die Hard With a Vengeance i
Samuel L. Jackson still remembers the priceless piece of career advice that Bruce Willis gave him when they were shooting Die Hard With a Vengeance in 1994. “He told me, ‘Hopefully you’ll be able to find a character that, when you make bad movies and they don’t make any money, you can always go back to this character everybody loves,” Jackson recalls. “He said, ‘Arnold’s got Terminator. Sylvester’s got Rocky, Rambo. I’ve got John McClane.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it didn’t occur to me until I got that Nick Fury role—and I had a nine-picture deal to be Nick Fury—that, Oh, I’m doing what Bruce said. I’ve got this character now.”
The strategy he shared with Jackson worked for both of them; Willis’s decades-long commercial success was duly noted, then and now. Yet Willis is less often praised for the work he did in between his blockbusters, the movies (some bad, many quite good) that didn’t make money, but were indicative of the tremendous risks he took over the course of his long career.
The actor, who turns 70 on March 19, has maneuvered that career with a dexterity and intelligence that’s often been complex to appreciate over the sonic boom of his giant blockbuster hits. It’s the kind of long-term strategy that only becomes clear in retrospect, when taking stock of who an actor is and what they’ve accomplished. Willis’s 2022 retirement from acting, following his diagnosis of aphasia (a language disorder that affects spoken and written communication) and, later, frontotemporal dementia (an umbrella term for brain diseases associated with personality, behavior, and language), gave the actor’s many fans and admirers the opportunity to reexamine and re-appreciate his gifts. Though Willis is no longer squarely in the public eye, he is still very much with us—surrounded by love and care—and we’re thankfully still able to applaud and elevate him.
Willis himself has always understood that great work often takes time to reveal itself. “I don’t believe that anything that gets said about films when they come out really has any meaning or longevity anyway,” he said in 1994. “It’s only 10, 15 years down the road you look back and you say, ‘This film really holds up; this film doesn’t hold up,’ you know?” The action tentpoles and big-budget vehicles with his name above the title certainly hold up: the Die Hard franchise, Armageddon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Fifth Element are all still ubiquitous in popular culture, revisited and celebrated as pure, thrilling popcorn cinema.
But Willis’s primary aim was nothing as elementary as movie stardom. “I never expected to become this famous,” he explained in 1990. “I wanted to be successful as an actor; I never equated that [with being] famous and having your life story in every newspaper in the country. I just never thought that far ahead. And I don’t know who does.”
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