Bruce Willis Doesn’t Know He Has Dementia, His Wife Says

Bruce Willis “doesn’t know” he has frontotemporal dementia, his wife, Emma Heming Willis, revealed in a new interview released Wednesday (Jan. 28). “Bruce never, never tapped in, Heming Willis, 47, said on the Conversations With Cam podcast. “He never connected the dots that he had this disease, and I’m really happy about that. I’m really happy that he doesn’t know about it.”

Willis, 70, retired from acting in 2022 after being diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder. His family later disclosed that his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. Heming Willis explained that her husband experiences a neurological phenomenon called anosognosia, in which the brain cannot recognize its own decline. “People think this might be denial, like they don’t want to go to the doctor because they’re like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’” she told host Cameron Oaks Rogers. “Actually, it’s this anosognosia that comes into play. It’s not denial. It’s just that their brain is changing. This is a part of the disease.” 

Unlike Alzheimer’s disease, which typically attacks memory, FTD primarily affects behavior, personality, and language. Heming Willis noted that her husband still recognizes her and their two daughters, Mabel, 13, and Evelyn, 11, as well as his three adult daughters with ex-wife Demi Moore. “He is still very much present in his body,” she said. “He has a way of 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. It’s still very meaningful.”

The couple met at a Los Angeles gym in the mid-2000s and married in 2009 in a ceremony at their home in Turks and Caicos. “I wasn’t really like a Bruce Willis fan per se,” Heming Willis said. “I grew up watching Moonlighting. I think I saw one Bruce Willis movie and that was Armageddon …  We started connecting on the phone and talking for hours and hours and it felt like high school, you know?”

She also discussed the painful period before his diagnosis, when communication breakdowns in their marriage led her to consider divorce — a common experience, she said, among couples later facing an FTD diagnosis: “You think your marriage is falling apart. You consider divorce, and then you land on, you know, finally a diagnosis where everything starts to kind of make sense.” Last year, she revealed that Willis now lives separately from her, with around-the-clock care.

“We have progressed along with him. We have adapted along with him,” she said. “It’s just different. You just learn how to adapt to it and meet them where they’re at.”