The Making of Silent Bruce

Bruce Willis was a fast-talking lead who became a man-of-few-words star. Which made his mental decline that much harder to notice.

- By Matt Zoller Seitz

BRUCE WILLIS'S STARDOM began in a boardroom at ABC in 1984. The network's top executives had gathered to discuss Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron's desire to cast the lead male role of David Addison with Willis, an ex-bartender from New Jersey whose only notable credit was a guest spot on Miami Vice. The executives pushed for a famous name to pair with Cybill Shepherd, a model turned actress who'd been a familiar face since the late 1960s, until the lone female executive in the room announced that she preferred Willis because he looked like "one dangerous fuck."

Willis got the part and brought a live-wire energy to Addison. The character was a Dagwood sandwich of contradictions. He was a self-proclaimed sexist who happily worked for a female boss and could be empathetic and chivalrous. He was a Jersey guy (like Willis) who had a common touch but could do Marx Brothers-level wordplay; drop references to classical music, theater, poetry, and mythology; and launch into a cappella renditions of '60s soul classics. When he wasn't working a case, he lived inside his art-and-culture-and-pop-music-saturated brain. With his sandpapery tenor voice, sinewy body, slightly receding hairline, bad-boy smirk, and soulful eyes, Willis was believable as a man whose joker act was self-protective. He was a romantic at heart, capable of intense, even doomed longing-a quality that was teased out in various self-enclosed episodic story lines before the writers finally got David and Maddie (Shepherd) together in season three, destroying the "will they or won't they" tension that had made the show a hit.

After going from anonymity to TV superstardom in a matter of months, Willis immediately began laying track for a movie career. He started in the late '80s with two Blake Edwards pictures,