Bruce Willis does not know that he is sick, wife Emma Heming Willis confirmed in a podcast interview released this week. He still does not understand what is happening to him, she says, and is unaware of the diagnosis that, since 2023, has forever changed his life and that of his family.
“Bruce never connected the dots. He never realized he had this disease.” Emma said on the latest episode of the Conversations with Cam podcast. “It is both a blessing and a curse,” she continued. “But I’m really glad he doesn’t know.”
After an initial diagnosis of aphasia, which was announced in 2022, the Die Hard star stepped away from acting. After reports of a more significant cognitive decline, his family announced that further testing had revealed that Willis was suffering from frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurodegenerative disease for which there is no cure.
FTD is the most common form of dementia in people under 60 (Bruce Willis is 70) and can also manifest with loss of motor skills, difficulty walking, swallowing or muscle spasms.
A condition called anosognosia frequently accompanies FTD — and it did in Willis’s case. “It’s when the brain can’t recognize what’s happening to it,” Emma said. “For these people, what they experience is simply normality. A lot of people think it’s denial, like when someone refuses to go to the doctor saying ‘I’m fine,’ but it’s not,” she says. “There is no denial here. It is the brain that is changing. It’s part of the disease.”
her words this week echo what she told Vanity Fair‘s Anna Peele in 2025. “Bruce would not be involved with his own coming-out process,” Peele wrote then regarding his FTD diagnosis. “He and Emma did not yet know this, but the part of his brain that controls self-awareness was deteriorating. Bruce will never understand what happened to his brain.”
Speaking now, Emma says the lack of awareness of his situation has also become a form of protection for Bruce Willis. “Bruce never latched on to the diagnosis. Never,” says his wife. “And I’m glad he doesn’t know what’s happening to him.”
Over time, the family has learned to move within a new daily routine, adapting to the progression of the disease. “He is still very much in his body,” says Emma, who found her husband a house near theirs, where he lives assisted by professionals. “And we have moved on together with him. We adapted, step by step.”
As a result, the relationship between the husband and wife has been transformed. “The way he connects with me and our daughters is not what you would normally have with a loved one,” she says. “But it’s still something very beautiful. It’s still full of meaning. It’s just different. You just have to learn to adapt.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair Italy.
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