Rumer Willis says her father, Bruce Willis, has found a “sweetness” as he continues living with dementia, a shift she described in an on-camera interview published Monday.
“I’m so grateful I get to go see him,” Willis said in the interview with The Inside Edit. “Even though it’s different now, I’m so grateful.” She added, “There’s a sweetness.”
Willis, 37, said her father has always been “this kind of macho dude,” but that the illness has revealed “a tenderness” in him that she said “being Bruce Willis might not have allowed him in a certain way.” Bruce Willis is 71 and retired from acting in 2022 after his family announced he had been diagnosed with aphasia. Nearly a year later, the family said he had frontotemporal dementia.
The diagnosis mattered beyond one Hollywood family because it helped put a little-known disease into public view. The family called frontotemporal dementia a “cruel disease” that “can strike anyone,” and said that for people under 60 it is the most common form of dementia. They also said diagnosis can take years. Willis said she did not realize until her father’s diagnosis how “prevalent” the disease is, adding, “It’s wild to me,” and, “So many people come up to me now and they say, ‘My uncle had FTD. My dad had this.'”
Her comments land at a moment when the family has kept the conversation about his condition mostly measured but ongoing. In March, Demi Moore shared a birthday tribute to Bruce Willis, one sign that the family continues to mark milestones publicly even as his health has changed. In November, Rumer Willis told followers on Instagram Stories that anybody with FTD is not doing great.
That candor has become part of how the family handles a diagnosis that changed life for Bruce Willis, for his three daughters with Moore — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah — and for his two younger daughters, Mabel and Evelyn, with Emma Heming Willis. Willis also has a daughter of her own, Louetta, whom she welcomed in April 2018 with Derek Richard Thomas before the pair split a year later. The picture she painted Monday was not of recovery. It was of love, adaptation and a father whose illness has altered him in ways that are painful but, in her words, also unexpectedly gentle. For the family, the answer to how he is doing is the one she gave in November: anybody with FTD is not doing great, but they are still going to see him.
