Bruce Willis’ Young Daughters Find Comfort in His Past Films amid His Dementia Diagnosis

NEED TO KNOW

• Bruce Willis’ wife Emma Heming Willis said in a new interview that their daughters Evelyn, 11, and Mabel, 13, love Bruce’s movies Over the Hedge and Moonrise Kingdom

• “It’s really hard to look back at the old movies,” Emma admitted of Bruce’s filmography

• Bruce retired from acting in 2022 and was diagnosed with frontotempoeral dementia in 2023; Emma just published her book about caregiving, The Unexpected Journey

Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis‘ daughters have found favorites among their father’s movies.

In an interview with The Times, published Saturday, Sept. 13, Emma, 49, revealed that her and Bruce’s youngest daughters Evelyn, 11, and Mabel, 13, are fond of the actor’s 2006 animated movie Over the Hedge and Moonrise Kingdom, his 2012 film with Wes Anderson. As Emma said, Evelyn loves watching Over the Hedge, in which Bruce, 70, voices a talking raccoon, while Mabel’s favorite film of his is Moonrise Kingdom, in which he portrays a police officer searching for two runaway children.

“It’s really hard to look back at the old movies,” Emma admitted to the outlet three years after he retired from acting due to receiving an aphasia diagnosis. The Willis family — Bruce also shares adult daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 31, with ex-wife Demi Moore — announced that Bruce’s condition had progressed into frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023.

“Other times I get stuck in the iCloud, videos and pictures on our phones. But I walk away from it just feeling, ugh — like I can’t believe it,” Emma added. “I can’t believe Bruce has this disease. I can’t believe what this disease has done to him.”

Emma spoke with The Times as she promotes her book The Unexpected Journey, which was published on Sept. 9. The former model previously shared that the family had moved Bruce to his own home near her house with Mabel and Evelyn in order to give Bruce a quiet, comfortable environment with around-the-clock care.

As Emma told the outlet, their daughters sit on Bruce’s lap when they arrive home from school and like to play in his garden. “You can see the tenderness of it. The girls don’t need him to be this or do that,” she said. “They have really adapted to his disease and they know how to move around him. It’s beautiful, but it’s hard for them. They miss him.”

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Emma also said that she and Bruce have developed “our own language, our own way to be with each other,” years after she first noticed signs of his dementia.

“It’s just about sitting with him, walking with him, listening to him as he tries to verbalize in his own language. Hearing him, validating him,” she added. “It’s hard. FTD is just an unkind disease — it constantly takes. Even when you think it can’t take any more, it takes a little more.”

Read the original article on People