In the ’80s, “Die Hard” seemed impossible to cast, with Hollywood heavy hitters like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Richard Gere and more passing on the role as NYPD detective John McClane.
Bruce Willis was not the team’s first, even second or third option for the role — and Willis’ agent, Arnold Rifkin, took full advantage of the opportunity, hiking up the actor’s acting price to $5 million, according to a new book, “The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage.”
“All the possible action people turned it down,” producer Larry Gordon said, per author Nick de Semlyen’s book. “We had a good script, but we could not get anybody to play John McClane.”
Rifkin was aware of the trouble the “Die Hard” team was going through and told Gordon, “Take it or leave it. If you don’t close the deal by Friday, he’s gonna go to Japan and do some commercials.”
Willis initially was like the others and passed on the role because of his commitment to the TV hit “Moonlighting.” His co-star, Cybill Shepherd, announced her pregnancy shortly after he passed on the role, which gave him an 11-week window of availability.
“They’re going to laugh you off the screen,” Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of “Moonlighting,” told Willis when he was cast. “That’s a Schwarzenegger movie.”
Willis eventually locked in the $5 million deal and on the first day of filming, the crew needed to make sure the actor was “alive” after shooting the first stunt.
The actor was taken to the top floor of a parking garage, wearing only black pants and his skin lathered in a gel-like substance.
“What’s this for?” Willis asked of the gel, de Semlyen wrote. “That’s so you don’t catch on fire,” a crew member replied.
Willis jumped straight off the five-story parking garage, landing on an inflatable airbag.
As he landed, plastic bags of gasoline were detonated, which pushed Willis to the very edge of the airbag. Immediately, the crew members on-site rushed to the actor, which he first thought was a compliment.
“When I landed, everyone came running over to me and I thought they were going to say, ‘Great job! Attaboy!’” Willis recalled. “And what they were doing is seeing if I’m alive because I almost missed the bag.”
The crew allegedly opted to film the scene earlier in case of the event that something went wrong — which it nearly did — they would have time to recast the role, according to de Semlyen’s book.
Willis laughed as he rolled off the airbag, but his new girlfriend at the time, Demi Moore, did not find the stunt very funny.
Moore also recounted the incident in a 2019 op-ed for The Telegraph. “I went to see him on set, which turned out to be terrifying,” Moore wrote. “He nearly died jumping off a five-storey garage, just making it on to the airbag below when he was blown off course by a scripted explosion. (He laughed about it. I didn’t.)”
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“Die Hard” director, John McTiernan, agreed with Willis that the stunt wasn’t too dangerous.
“We didn’t do anything dangerous with Bruce. He loved doing it,” McTiernan said. “Movies are a manufacturing activity, and you don’t get your workers hurt, period. But that night made it so that he could imagine the real circumstance, and could really say, ‘Holy s–t, this is f–king crazy!’”
“Die Hard” went on to be the highest grossing action film in 1988 and was the beginning of Willis’ long, successful career in show business.
In March 2022, it was announced that Willis would be “stepping away” from his acting career due to an aphasia diagnosis. It was later announced that Willis had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia or FTD.