Back in 2022, it was announced that Bruce Willis would be retiring from acting after he was diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate. Nearly a year later, his family shared that his condition had progressed into frontotemporal dementia. While this places the iconic actor, known for Die Hard and The Sixth Sense, out of the swing of a lot of Hollywood circles, apparently he and his Moonlighting co-star Cybill Shephard had a chance to get on better terms prior to his health struggles going public.
Back in 2000, Cybill Shepherd characterized Bruce Willis a “jerk” while talking about their past on Moonlighting, per The Scottish Daily Record. There were also claims from their co-stars that they “hated each other” and were “unhappy” working together. However, when Shepherd recently spoke to People about Willis, she said they were actually able to mend things between them before he officially retired. In her words:
Yes, I’m very grateful for that. Yeah, it was time.
Shepherd’s comments about Willis were from pages of her 2000 memoir, Cybill Disobedience, where she said that there was a mutual flirtation between herself and Willis when they first met on Moonlighting. The actress claimed they “never did finish what we started,” but she was ultimately happy they didn’t because “Bruce Willis is a jerk.”
Also, their Moonlighting co-star Curtis Armstrong said in his 2017 memoir Revenge Of The Nerd that Shepherd and Willis “hated each other,” via Us Weekly. Allyce Beasley said in 2019 that they were “very hard to be around”, in part due to the show’s heavy workload. However, that was 25 years ago, and things have clearly changed since between the co-stars.
In the past few years, the Willis family has gone through a lot in conjunction with the Die Hard actor’s health struggles. Back in August, Willis’s wife, Emma Heming, announced that they had made the decision to have him live in a separate home and get full-time care.
On a similar front, Shepherd also called Christine Baranski “unfriendly” when they were co-stars on the sitcom Cybill back in the day. She said she and Baranski are “good now” in the same new interview, adding that they were able to mend their relationship by talking and being “real open-hearted with each other.”
Every Moonlighting episode, which aired for five seasons from 1985 to 1989, began streaming for the first time a couple of years ago, which was highlighted by Willis’s wife, one of his daughters and, of course, the many fans who had been waiting to revisit it. It’s perhaps even more enjoyable now that we know its two costars are not at odds with the other.