Bruce Willis starred “Moonlighting” is now available on streaming for the first time on Hulu. Recently, the series creator Glenn Gordon Caron spoke to the New York Post and confirmed he was able to tell series star Bruce Willis about the show’s streaming resurgence amid the actor’s ongoing frontotemporal dementia (FTP) diagnosis.
Bruce Willis had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) last month. The retired actor stepped out in Santa Monica on Thursday. FTD symptoms often arise in younger patients between the ages of 40 and 65, according to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
During the filming sessions in which the actor was present, people present could already sense that something was not right. He had difficulty in holding conversations, coupled with not being able to connect words correctly. Recently, Willis’ wife says it is “hard to know” if the award-winning actor is aware of the frontotemporal dementia he was diagnosed with earlier this year.
“Moonlighting,” the Emmy-nominated ABC dramedy that ran for five seasons and 67 episodes in the late-1980s, served as Willis’ acting breakthrough. He plays a wisecracking detective who teams up with a former fashion model (Cybill Shepherd) to solve crimes after she finds herself broke and left with a detective agency as her only asset.
“I know [Bruce is] really happy that the show is going to be available for people, even though he can’t tell me that,” Caron told The Post. “When I got to spend time with him we talked about it and I know he’s excited… The process [to get ‘Moonlighting’ on to Hulu] has taken quite a while and Bruce’s disease is a progressive disease, so I was able to communicate with him, before the disease rendered him as incommunicative as he is now, about hoping to get the show back in front of people. I know it means a lot to him.”
Caron said that he stays in touch with Willis and the actor’s wife, Emma Heming Willis, and he provided a health update on the actor, who retired from the profession after his FTP diagnosis.
“The thing that makes [his disease] so mind-blowing is [that] if you’ve ever spent time with Bruce Willis, there is no one who had any more joie de vivre than he,” Caron said. “He loved life and… just adored waking up every morning and trying to live life to its fullest.”
“My sense is the first one to three minutes he knows who I am,” he added of his visits to Willis. “He’s not totally verbal; he used to be a voracious reader — he didn’t want anyone to know that — and he’s not reading now. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce… When you’re with him you know that he’s Bruce and you’re grateful that he’s there, but the joie de vivre is gone.”
