Bruce Willis’ diagnosis in March 2022 hit fans around the world hard. Even though the action star has mainly attracted attention in recent years due to idiosyncratic and negative headlines about his behavior on the set of various film productions and only B-movies instead of big action films – given his aphasia, both developments now appear in a completely new light – the news of Willis’s aphasia diagnosis and the end of his acting career reached the film world.
After all, the actor was an action icon of 1980s cinema. The fragile action hero John McClane from Die Hard, in particular, will forever hold a place in the hearts of any action movie buff. However, from the circles of the star’s closest confidants, it is heard that the signs of the disease have been noticeable for many years. There are also suspicions that an accident on the set of the war film”Tears of the suncould be the main trigger for the disease.
Could an injury on a movie set have caused the disease?
Bruce Willis Aphasia Disorder is a speech disorder resulting from brain injury that sometimes severely affects a person’s ability to communicate. Among other things, it can affect the ability to speak for oneself, but also the ability to understand other people, to varying degrees of severity.
Suggestions that the disease could be the result of an injury on the set of Antoine Fuqua’s (“The Equalizer”) brutal war movie Tears of the Sun seem to come from Bruce Willis’ circle. An unnamed friend made a comment in the tabloid in March 2022 that the changes in Bruce Willis were noticeable about 5 years ago.
“In the beginning it wasn’t about anything big, it was about little things, like he needed help speaking with earplugs. Everyone who knew him knew something was wrong, we just didn’t know the exact diagnosis. We knew that there was something cognitively wrong, it was no secret, but that specific diagnosis and the fact that he wouldn’t act again was surprising.”
Bruce Willis is suing the studio
Of course, such statements should be treated with caution. The gossip paper isn’t exactly known for doing serious source work and the fact that an unspecified “friend” is quoted here makes you sit up and take notice. And yet there was the described accident on the set of “Tears of the Sun”.
After using pyrotechnics, the action star was hit in the head by a “projectile” during filming. Willis subsequently filed a lawsuit against Revolution Studios, seeking compensation from the film studio for “extreme mental, physical, and emotional pain”. In addition, special effects professional Joe Pancake was sued, accusing Willis of negligence.
‘The judge laughed him out of the courtroom’
Joe Pancake, who was responsible for the special effects on the war actor’s set, described the his view of things:
Pancake calls possibility injury on set of ‘Tears of the Sun’ could be trigger for action star’s aphasia ‘bullshit’. “The judge laughed him out of the courtroom,” says Pancake, adding that Willis “scared his name through the mud for two years” before finally settling in August 2005. Nor does he understand why aphasia symptoms suddenly appear after a 20-year Injury.
Aphasia can develop over the years
Unfortunately, however, it seems entirely possible that aphasia may not fully manifest until years after the actual injury, as reported by the appears. While many patients experience aphasia suddenly, there are also cases where the disease develops over years. Dr. Shazam Hussain, director of the Cerebrovascular Center at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, says: “Their sentences get shorter and shorter… Then they get to a point where they have trouble expressing themselves.”
For us as film fans, only uncertainty remains. Of course, there was an accident on the set of the action war movie that injured Bruce Willis in the head. Whether this injury was actually the cause of the illness that would end his acting career almost 20 years later and also significantly limit the former action star in everyday life, cannot be said.