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Bruce Willis doesn’t know he has frontotemporal dementia. His wife Emma Heming Willis explained this in a new interview published on Wednesday (January 28). “I’m really glad he doesn’t know,” she said of the actor.
The 70-year-old never recognized the connection, explained Heming Willis, 47, on the “Conversations With Cam” podcast. “Bruce never really connected with it. He never connected the dots that he had this disease, and I’m very happy about that. I’m really glad he doesn’t know.”
Bruce Willis retired from acting in 2022 after being diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder.
Diagnosis, withdrawal from acting and anosognosia
His family later announced that his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Heming Willis explained that her husband suffers from a neurological phenomenon called anosognosia, in which the brain cannot recognize its own deterioration.
“A lot of people think it’s repression, like, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ and that’s why you don’t go to the doctor,” she told host Cameron Oaks Rogers. “But actually this anosognosia plays a role here. It’s not repression. It’s just that the brain changes. That’s part of this disease.”
Difference to Alzheimer’s and family closeness
Unlike Alzheimer’s disease, which primarily attacks memory, FTD primarily affects behavior, personality and language. Heming Willis emphasized that her husband still recognizes her and their daughters Mabel (13) and Evelyn (11), as well as his three adult daughters from his marriage to Demi Moore.
“He’s very physically present,” she said. “He has a way of connecting with me and our children that may not be the same as it used to be, but it’s still very beautiful. It’s still very meaningful.”
Getting to know each other, marriage and early relationship
The couple met at a Los Angeles gym in the mid-2000s and married in a ceremony at their home in the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2009. “I honestly wasn’t a big Bruce Willis fan,” Heming Willis said. “And I grew up watching ‘Moonlighting.’ I think I saw a Bruce Willis movie and that was ‘Armageddon’.”
She continued: “We started talking on the phone for hours and it felt like high school, you know?”
Time before diagnosis and current situation
Heming Willis also spoke about the painful period before the diagnosis, when communication problems in the marriage even made her think about divorce. This is a common experience for couples who later face an FTD diagnosis. “You think your marriage is falling apart. You think about divorce, and then at some point you finally get a diagnosis where a lot of things suddenly make sense.”
Last year she made it public that Willis now lives separately from her and is being cared for around the clock. “We grew with him. We adapted with him,” she said. “It’s just different. You learn to adapt to it and meet people where they are.”
