Bruce Willis “doesn’t know” he has dementia, according to his wife Emma Heming Willis.
Heming Willis, who has been married to the 70-year-old actor since 2009, recently appeared on the Conversations With Cam Podcast and opened up about her husband’s health, revealing the latest update.
“I think they think this is their normal,” she said. “There is this term, this neurological condition, that comes with FTD and other types of dementia as well, called anosognosia, where your brain can’t identify what is happening to it. Where people think this might be denial, where they don’t want to go to the doctor because they’re like, ‘I’m fine.’ Actually, this is the anosognosia that comes into play. It’s not denial. It’s just that their brain is changing. This is a part of the disease.”
Heming Willis continued, “That’s the blessing and the curse of this is that Bruce never tapped in. He never connected the dots that he had this disease. I’m really happy about that. I’m really happy he doesn’t know about it.”
She also explained that the Die Hard star still recognizes his family members. The couple shares two daughters, who are 11 and 13 years old.
“He is still very much present in his body,” she continued. “When someone says to me, ‘Does Bruce still know who you are?’ Yes, he does, because he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s; he has FTD. He has a way with connecting with me, our children, that might not be the same as you would connect with your loved one, but it’s still very beautiful and meaningful. It’s just different. You just learn how to adapt.”
Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023, which hinders his ability to communicate.
Last August, Heming Willis said The Sixth Sense actor was still “very mobile” to Diane Sawyer. “Bruce is in really great health overall,” Heming Willis said in an ABC special. “It’s just his brain that is failing him. … The language is going and we’ve learned to adapt. And we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a different way.”
Demi Moore, who was married to Willis for 13 years from 1987 to 2000, and the pair’s three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Willis, praised Willis’ wife for supporting him amid his decline.
“I have so much compassion for Emma in this, being a young woman,” Moore said last September in a pretaped interview played on an episode of The Oprah Podcast. “There’s no way that anybody could have anticipated where this was going to go. And I really think she’s done a masterful job. She has been so dedicated to forging the right path. She’s had equal amounts of fear and strength and courage in navigating this.”