Bruce Willis’s daughter Tallulah: ‘While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, my dad was quietly struggling’

Bruch Willis’s family announced in March 2022 that the actor suffered from aphasia, a brain disease that affects speech, which has forced him to abandon his Hollywood career. A year later, his loved ones publicly shared that the symptom is a characteristic of the frontotemporal dementia that the actor suffers, a progressive neurological disorder that causes his cognition and behavior to decay day after day, as his daughter Tallulah Willis relates in a text she wrote for Vogue. “I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” says the youngest of the actor’s three daughters with Demi Moore. “It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness,” writes Tallulah, also an actress. “Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.”

Tallulah opens up in the text, admitting that she has “met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial” that she isn’t proud of. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it,” she explains, enumerating the disorders she has experienced throughout her life, including anorexia, depression and ADHD. “While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling. All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she writes in the magazine, remembering the first time that the actor’s illness “hit [her] painfully.” “I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the bride’s father made a moving speech. Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes,” confesses Tallulah, who last June broke off her engagement with film director Dillon Buss.

After going to a series of rehab centers and trying different therapies to treat her eating disorders and mental illness, the youngest member of the Willis-Moore family believes she now has the tools to be present in all aspects of her life, “especially in my relationship with my dad.” “In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon,” she writes.

Now, she confesses that she takes “tons of photos” whenever she goes to Bruce’s house — ‘I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to” — and that she saves his voice messages on a hard drive. “I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us,” she explains.

Beyond her father’s state of health, Tallulah also speaks honestly about the difficulties of growing up in a famous family, “struggling to find a patch of light through the long shadows” of her parents. As she writes, her world changed when she was 11 years old after attending an event in New York with her mother, Demi Moore, and Moore’s then-partner, the actor Ashton Kutcher. “I felt awfully grown-up and was very pleased with myself — and I wanted to see if my outfit had made the party pages of any of the style websites. So I opened my laptop and went to the usual places (this was the heyday of Perez Hilton; celebrity kids were fair game), and there I was in my tweenage awkwardness, standing beside my famously beautiful mom. Then I found my way to the comments, hundreds of them, the words just burning off the screen. ‘Wow, she looks deformed. Look at her man jaw — she’s like an ugly version of her dad. Her mother must be so disappointed.’ I remember how deadly silent the room was. I sat reading for two hours, believing that I had stumbled onto a truth about myself that no one had told me because they were trying to protect me. And for years afterward, protecting people right back, I told no one. I just lived with the silent certainty of my own ugliness,” she wrote.

Even so, the actress also recalls the good memories she has with her family, like the recent birth of her niece Louetta, the daughter of her sister Rumer, who has made grandparents of Moore and Willis, for 11 years the most famous couple in film. “There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably. It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it,” she says. Lately, her father can be found on the first floor of his home, somewhere in the open space of the kitchen, living room and dining room, or in his office. “Thankfully, dementia has not affected his mobility,” she writes. The advantage of frontotemporal dementia, compared to Alzheimers, she explains, is that it is characterized by lack of language rather than memory loss. “He still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room,” she writes.

The actor’s third daughter speaks of her father in both the present and past tense: “He was cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky — and I embrace all that. Those are the genes I inherited from him.” She is reluctant to let go of the hope that she still has in her father. “I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me,” she says, “and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time.”

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