Bruce Willis suffered a serious hearing injury in his most iconic film that accelerated his dementia, according to his wife

In 2023, Bruce Willis’ family confirmed that the actor suffers from frontotemporal dementia, a disease that affects language, behavior, and memory. This neurodegenerative condition has caused Willis to lose much of his ability to communicate. Now, Emma Heming, his current wife, has revealed where she believes the brain disorder originated: during the filming of the first ‘Die Hard’ movie, when he was playing John McClane, he suffered irreversible hearing damage which, according to her, may have contributed to the early development of his dementia.

Emma Heming, Bruce Willis’ wife, explains how a hearing injury during the filming of ‘Die Hard’ affected the actor’s health

In September 2025, Emma Heming, Bruce Willis’ wife, published a book about her experience caring for the convalescing actor, who was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in February 2023. Entitled Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, this nonfiction work details the harshness of Heming and Willis’s daily lives. The book also details what Heming believes to be the origin of the actor’s current health problems: the filming of the first Die Hard movie, released in 1988.

Both in the book and in a recent interview with Fox News Digital, Heming points to a specific scene from the legendary action movie: “When Bruce was shooting the first ‘Die Hard,’ he shot a gun underneath a table multiple times, and they didn’t have him wear any kind of ear protection. That took out a huge percentage of his hearing. And over time, for all of us as we age, our hearing starts to go a bit.“ Over the years, Willis himself has also admitted on several occasions that this scene cost him ”about two-thirds” of his hearing.

When the interpreter began to show the first signs of dementia and ignored his loved ones during family gatherings, Heming came to believe that he simply couldn’t hear them due to his hearing problems. However, when he also began to suffer sudden personality changes, including a lack of empathy, Emma noticed and, before the definitive diagnosis, thought that her marriage was simply going through a crisis, completely unaware that these symptoms were consistent with the early stages of dementia.

The sad story of Bruce Willis also reopens the eternal debate about safety on film and television sets. Although protective measures for actors are much stricter today than they used to be, it is not always possible to predict the impact that an accident or seemingly minor negligence can have on an actor’s health. Often, the physical and neurological consequences do not become apparent until several decades later, when the damage is already irreversible.

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