Matthew Perry prayed “every night” for Bruce Willis leading up to his death amid the “Die Hard” actor’s battle with the neurodegenerative disorder frontotemporal dementia.
The “Friends” alum, who died at age 54 on Oct. 28, looked back on his first meeting with Willis, 68, before they starred together in 2000’s “The Whole Nine Yards” in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”
Their working relationship began with an amusing message that Willis left on Perry’s answering machine.
” ‘Matthew, this is Bruce Willis. Call me back, or I’ll burn your house down and break both your knees and arms and you’ll be left with just the stubs for hands and feet for the rest of your life.’ Click, dial tone. I figured this was a call I should probably return,” Perry recalled.
A few days later, the pair met at Italian restaurant Ago in Hollywood. Naturally, Willis “did not disappoint” and “oozed A-list” in Perry’s eyes.
“He didn’t just take over a room, he was the room. In fact, I knew he was a real movie star when the first thing he did was teach the bartender how to make the perfect vodka tonic. ‘Three-second pour,’ he said to the petrified man,” the “Fools Rush In” actor wrote. “He was a party; to be near him was invigorating.”
Willis was 44 at the time and newly separated from Demi Moore, according to Perry. After dinner, they went back to Willis’ “massive house off Mulholland” and hit “golf balls into the San Fernando Valley below” with “drinks in hand.”
“We had begun a friendship, one in which we drank together and made each other laugh and complimented each other’s swings . . . Nothing seemed to bother Bruce, no one said no to him. This was, indeed, the A-leagues,” Perry added.
The veteran actor would call Perry again to screen his next movie. “Sick and hungover” Perry, however, made “excuses” as to why he couldn’t swing by.
“I asked him what the movie was called, so I could catch it later,” he wrote. ” ‘The Sixth Sense,’ he said.”
The two would go on to star together in “The Whole Nine Yards.” They flew on Willis’ plane to Montreal to start filming and stayed at the InterContinental hotel.
“So, I’d gotten ‘The Whole Nine Yards’ and had embarked on a friendship with the most famous movie star on the planet, but even I knew I was drinking way too much to pull this movie off. Desperate measures would be needed. Some might be able to party perfectly well and still show up and do the work — but they were not addicts like I was,” Perry wrote. “If I was going to keep up with the partying, and with Bruce, and not go back to my hotel room and keep drinking, then I’d need something else to wind down and make sure I could get to set the next day.”
“I had a regular room; Bruce had the whole top floor, which he immediately dubbed ‘Club Z,’ for no apparent reason,” he continued. “Within hours, he had also had a disco ball installed.”
Each night “parties raged” at Club Z, and Perry nursed “a killer hangover” on set. At one point, he called a pal (using the word pal “loosely”) and asked for 100 Xanax.
“I may have been a man with a plan, but I was also ignoring the fact that this was a completely lethal combination,” he admitted. “But there was a big difference between Bruce and me. Bruce was a partier; I was an addict. Bruce has an on-off button. He can party like crazy, then get a script like ‘The Sixth Sense’ and stop partying and nail the movie sober. He doesn’t have the gene — he’s not an addict.”
Perry was proud of the project he and Willis accomplished, but Willis wasn’t as sure that the film would be a hit with audiences. Alas, a bet was made.
“Bruce hadn’t been sure the film would work at all, and I’d bet him it would — if he lost, he had to do a guest spot on ‘Friends’ (he’s in three episodes of Season 6.),” he mused in his memoir. The movie ended up being No. 1 in America for three weeks straight.
Years later, Perry would open up about his drug and alcohol addiction battle, specifically detailing his struggles like never before in his memoir. Months before Perry’s Nov. 1, 2022 memoir release, Willis’ family would reveal that February that the actor was stepping away from acting due to his dementia diagnosis.
In October, “Moonlighting” creator Glenn Gordon Caron also told The Post that Willis is “not totally verbal.”
“My sense is the first one to three minutes he knows who I am,” he said. “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.”
Following the news, Perry would think about Willis and wish him the best from afar.
“Sometimes, at the end of the night, when the sun was just about to come up and everyone else had gone, and the party was over, Bruce and I would just sit and talk. That’s when I saw the real Bruce Willis — a good-hearted man, a caring man, selfless. A wonderful parent. And a wonderful actor. And most important, a good guy,” he wrote in his book. “And if he wanted me to be, I would be his friend for life. But as is the way with so many of these things, our paths rarely crossed after that. I, of course, pray for him every night now.”
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