Playboy Interview: Bruce Willis

a candid conversation with the work-hard, play-hard star of tv and movies about "moonlighting," sex, fistfights and fatherhood

In the same month that two national magazines' readers'-and-critics' polls voted Bruce Willis the worst singer, the worst comedy actor, the worst dramatic actor and the worst-dressed actor on television, 20th Century Fox announced that it was paying him $5,000,000 to star in "Die Hard"—only his third feature film—and Frank Sinatra gave his OK to have Willis portray the Chairman of the Board in a future eight-hour miniseries.

Whatever some fans may think he is doing wrong, to the people who put up the money, the 33-year-old Willis was obviously a risk worth taking at the box office. Perhaps that's because, despite mixed success as a movie star, he has gained a reputation as a special kind of male folk hero, an antidote to the oversensitive New Age male—an unrepentant, unabashed enjoyer of pretty women, good times and loud music. Even now that he has hung up his party jacket to become a husband and a father, Willis still holds claim to representing a species sometimes thought to be endangered: a guy's guy.

Until 1985, when the first "Moonlighting" episode brought the fast-talking, sarcastic, smoothly chauvinistic TV detective David Addison to national attention, Willis was just another struggling actor. He had lost out on the part of Madonna's boyfriend in "Desperately Seeking Susan" and had turned down an offer to be one of the leads in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." However, he had played tough, memorable characters in a "Miami Vice" episode and as Eddie in Sam Shepard's powerful play "Fool for Love." Solid, but nothing spectacular.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, a young writer-producer named Glenn Gordon Caron had come up with the idea of the Blue Moon Detective Agency—run by a woman who takes on a male partner who both irritates and attracts her. Caron believed that there were few real men on television. "There were a lot of boys," he told one writer, "and a lot of white wine being consumed, and a lot of breathy conversations, but not a whole lot of real male behavior. I wanted a guy who plants his feet and speaks his mind and deals with women as he deals with men." What he was looking for to cast against Cybill Shepherd was a hip, modern-day Cary Grant. What he found, after auditioning 3000 actors, was Bruce Willis.

By the end of "Moonlighting's" first year, the critical and popular response was overwhelming. In 1986, the show received 16 Emmy nominations (though it won just one). The sexual sparks between Willis and Shepherd were palpable. Audiences couldn't wait to learn when, or if, David and Maddie would sleep together. Tabloids took the TV dynamics and tried to find parallels in real life. Stories appeared reporting that both stars were turning into egomaniacal monsters: Cybill hated Bruce and his macho attitudes—he was just the kind of man she would avoid in real life; Willis was rumored to be on the edge, taking out his frustrations by punching a bag and blasting music inside his trailer. It was a weekly soap opera that continued to boost the ratings.

The facts were less sensational: There were tensions on the set, but they were more the result of 12- and 15-hour working days and pressures to keep to a schedule. Because of the density of the scripts and the rapid-fire staccato of the exchanges, there was twice as much dialog to learn as on a typical one-hour TV program.

For other reasons, the show's intimate style proved tough to sustain. Willis began to improvise his lines on the set and, while that kind of spontaneity worked with his co-star, who could respond in kind, it became one more hurdle for guest stars used to the tightly controlled world of episodic television. "We have a shorthand on this show," Willis said, "especially when we do screwball comedy with overlapping dialog. When an actor comes into that and is not trained that way, it becomes a scary thing."

The show faced another challenge when Shepherd became pregnant last year. New, less successful plot twists were created to account for Maddie's pregnancy. And when Shepherd took time off to give birth to twins, the show closed down for almost three months, allowing Willis time to make a movie. Now going into its fourth season, "Moonlighting" seems to be back on track, with Maddie having jettisoned a marriage to another character and she and David going at each other again like a couple of seasoned boxers. Whether they will ever recapture the freshness of the first three seasons, however, is an open question, and criticism of the show's writing has increased. Willis has said he will throw in the towel after a fifth season, when his contract expires. He intends to concentrate on movies and to record with Motown, which produced his poorly received first album, "The Return of Bruno."

All pretty heady stuff for a once fairly ordinary guy from New Jersey. Willis grew up in a blue-collar town called Carneys Point—where most of the men, including his father, worked in one of the chemical plants along the Delaware River. Willis worked at the plant and at a series of odd jobs. When he was 16, his parents split, up, and the separation deeply affected him and his two brothers and sister. Within a year, he was living on his own, and after discovering acting at Montclair State College, he left in his sophomore year to try to make it in New York. He got a part off-Broadway, worked nights as a bartender and eventually found commercial work doing Levi's 501 Jeans commercials. He appeared in tiny roles in "The First Deadly Sin," which starred Frank Sinatra, and in "The Verdict," with Paul Newman. TV soaps followed, then the Sam Shepard play on Broadway and, finally, prime-time television.

With "Moonlighting" a hit, Willis found himself in demand for movies. A script, "Burglar," was developed for him, but he didn't like it and it was altered for Whoopi Goldberg. He made a Blake Edwards film, "Blind Date," with Kim Basinger (Madonna, originally cast, had to pull out), which did well at the box office. He followed that with the widely panned "Sunset"—in which he plays cowboy star Tom Mix—and the current cop caper "Die Hard."

Success did not spoil Willis' appetite for partying. For a while, to believe the press he got, it seemed as if most of his parties in the Hollywood Hills ended with neighbors' calling the police. On one occasion, he and four friends were arrested for pushing and cursing at a cop who had entered his home without a warrant.

Willis also had his serious relationships. He was involved for three years with Sheri Rivera, Geraldo Rivera's ex-wife, and later fell in love with actress Demi Moore, who had ended a relationship with Emilio Estevez. Willis married, the 25-year-old Moore in November 1987 in a private ceremony in Las Vegas and then married her again in December in Los Angeles. She became pregnant soon after and gave birth to a daughter this past summer.

To find out if success and marriage have begun to mellow the wisecracking, hard-living Willis, we sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel, veteran Playboy interviewer of such showbiz giants as Marlon Brando and Barbra Streisand, to visit him on the 20th Century Fox lot, where "Moonlighting" is produced. Grobel's report:

"He's lying in the dim trailer, where he lives like a mole for 12 hours a day, his refuge from the world outside, he says. He has his cellular phone, his music, his speakers and his books—the one he's currently absorbed in is about parenting and child care. His refrigerator is stocked with soft drinks and his freezer with Dole Fruit and Cream Bars.

"Often wary of reporters, Willis was a surprisingly open and straightforward guy once he settled into our talks. After a few hours, he was called to the set and invited me along but set one ground rule: 'You can't talk with Cybill about any of this. Just watch.'

"Cybill came onto the set after nursing her babies and said to Willis, 'So nice to see you.' 'So nice to be seen by you,' Willis responded. 'Aw, that's nice,' whispered a crew member. The scene they were shooting was done in one take, and Bruce and I returned to his trailer for more hours of conversation.

"The next day, he was given his freedom for a few hours, and we took off in my little convertible to grab lunch at a restaurant that closed in 20 minutes. As we zigzagged our way through traffic with the top down, drivers recognized Willis and spoke to him. I got caught behind a car making a left turn and a van passed us, the driver yelling, 'Get another driver, Bruce!'

"People obviously like Willis—as we drove, they talked to him as if they knew him, and he waved and shouted back, asking for directions. When I said I didn't think we'd make it, he said, 'Have faith, be positive.' But when we arrived two minutes late, the maître d' refused to seat us. Star clout was of no avail—rules were rules—so we made do with a ham sandwich and a paper bowl of soup at a bakery next door. No problem.

"Two days after we finished our marathon talks, Willis called to ask if I had any more questions for him and to say that the Playboy sessions had exhausted him. I told him he should be exhausted, what with finishing his film, shooting his TV show, preparing for fatherhood and talking with a journalist for eight hours each day. 'That's enough,' I said, 'to slow down even the hottest of stars.' And maybe if the show's ratings slide or if his latest movies don't bring in the expected gold, he'll return to planet speed. In the mercurial business he's in, he's about due for a change. But either way, he'll continue to live out the kind of fantasy life that comes along just once in a blue moon."

[Q] Playboy: Although you're in the papers all the time, you haven't really been accessible to the media. With the exception of some promotional appearances, why such reluctance to talk? And why talk now?

[A] Willis: I feel the need to let some information out. Yeah, there's been a lot of interest in this guy who rose so rapidly. But the problem is that so much of the focus on me has been directed toward my personal life—what I do when the cameras stop rolling. It's just become unbalanced. I made a choice early in my career not to do a lot of press, not to open myself up to talking about my private life, which, when push comes to shove, is what people want to know. They don't want to know how you researched a film, they want to know who you are fucking. I chose not to do that.

[Q] Playboy: It isn't just that you rose rapidly; you really did turn famous overnight, didn't you?

[A] Willis: The velocity with which I was thrust into this world of overnight success, what they call a meteoric rise, happened so quickly that every day was a brand-new-thing. It was a major, major change for me. And there was no one I could find who could tell me how to handle it.

[A] I had never considered TV a medium in which to achieve what I thought my idea of success was. I always thought it was going to go from off-off-Broadway to off-Broadway to Broadway to films. So when it happened this way, I was afraid. I felt like I was going over a bridge where the handrails were taken away, and at any point, I didn't know what was going to knock me over. I didn't know that I was afraid of it, but enough time has gone by that I've been able to get some objectivity on what was happening to me when my success first occurred.

[Q] Playboy: And have you found that people treat you differently now?

[A] Willis: Well, all my jokes seem to have become a lot funnier. It's nice to be treated with deference; I'm not going to deny that. But it's also embarrassing. When people are confronted with me, it's such a shock to them. They see this guy on TV every Tuesday night and he's laughing and cracking jokes and they like him; they'd want to hang around with this guy. I was in the Midwest on a tour, and all of a sudden, there I was, right in front of 'em. People just lose their composure. I want to try to prop them up and say, "Come on, it's OK."

[A] All of this has to do with my own sense of self-worth and whether or not I feel I've deserved all of this simply because of one acting job. Because no matter how big Moonlighting gets, no matter how popular I become, it's just an acting job. And it certainly is tempting to lose sight of that, to become the person they want me to be—some big pompous asshole who stomps around Hollywood, shoves baby carriages out of the way, smokes a cigar, kicks ass and talks loud. People want me to become that. I have no desire to be like that person.

[Q] Playboy: Wait a minute, Bruce—you've been known to kick some ass, talk loud, stomp around Hollywood. Are you trying to tell us that you're really not a big pompous asshole?

[A] Willis: I'm at a totally different place than I've ever been in my life now. I'm a lot more comfortable with myself; I'm taking life with a lot more humor, not taking all this shit so seriously. I'm enjoying myself a lot more. I had the pleasure of meeting Glenn Ford last New Year's Eve, and he said, "I see these articles about you and Penn and the rest of you guys. Man, Henry Fonda, Bogart, Bob Mitchum—we raised more hell than you guys ever did. We tore this town right up." Then he said, "Just keep laughing, son. It don't mean a thing."

[Q] Playboy: Ford may be right, but that doesn't keep the tabloids from having a field day. From what we've read, you made a spectacle of yourself at a Tom Waits concert in Los Angeles, pushed people out of your way at Elaine's in New York, then threw your coat in a waiter's face——

[A] Willis:None of that happened! But because I choose not to answer those things, they get carved in stone somewhere. You know, for six or eight months, I was in those scandal sheets once a week. Once a week! There was some poll that said that right after Princess Di, if you put my picture on the cover of a magazine, you would sell more copies of that issue than any other. But that's business—and it took me a long time to realize that. I'm at that point where there's nothing else they can say about me; my life has been spread across those scandal sheets.

[Q] Playboy: Was it also a lie when it was reported that on New Year's Eve, you and your wife, Demi Moore, went to Spago's with seven bodyguards?

[A] Willis: A lie. We had one guy who works for us to protect Demi, because she was pregnant. I don't know anybody who has seven bodyguards. I think what you're talking about was when we left out the back of the restaurant to avoid the paparazzi. It's extremely uncomfortable being surrounded by 40 photographers who are flashing bulbs. Not long ago, we went to a screening, and 30 or 40 paparazzi chased us from the theater to our car. We were literally blinded for five or ten seconds, and my wife stumbled and almost fell. I got crazy! I started yelling at them, "Get the fuck out of here; that's enough!" It scared me, because of the baby, and I got angry. I don't begrudge people trying to take pictures of us, because we are newsworthy; people want to read about what we are doing. But the paparazzi take it to an extreme. It's very disorienting; you feel hemmed in by people four feet in front of you, flashing away. It's a very helpless feeling. And as a man, I don't like to feel helpless. The only thing that I will not tolerate is someone actually touching a member of my family. I will protect my family to the death.

[A] I used to fight against all those things, but I've learned to become calmer about them rather than go crazy, beat my head against the wall and say, "These people are fucking with me!" I just think of them as parasites that suck blood out of people.

[Q] Playboy: You must sympathize with Cher's boyfriend, who ran his car into a photographer's car outside her home.

[A] Willis: At some point, a line must be drawn—how far can someone go to harass a person for a story? Now they hope someone will try to hit them with a car so they can get that story. This "poor" guy whose car was hit by Cher's guy is suing for "emotional stress." Bullshit. He knew what he was doing.

[Q] Playboy: Did Demi help calm you down about all of this?

[A] Willis: She helped me by teaching me the philosophy of letting go. The more I hung on to my anger, the more power I gave those people over me.

[Q] Playboy: So, let's see: When was the last time you were in a fight?

[A] Willis: In New York, some years back, when I was tending bar. I used to go over the bar all the time to break things up, then get slugged and start swinging. But I haven't struck anyone in anger in a long time. Though a fight happened around me at a club in L.A., while I was filming Sunset. I was wearing this cowboy hat and was with a group of my friends. This guy stands up and says, "Hey, faggot. Hey, you, Bruce, faggot." I ignored him and started laughing. Five minutes later, he goes, "Hey, faggot, you in the hat." So I walked over and said, "Do I know you?" He goes, "No, faggot." "Why are you doing this? Are you trying to impress the girls?" I turned to the girls he was with and said, "Girls, are you impressed?" And right then, he snapped my hat. I said, "OK, fuck it, let's go." I was in the process of pulling my hand up, and a right comes flying by my ear and I see this guy's face get demolished in superslow motion. One of my friends had tapped him. He went down—boom! I never threw a punch, but a big brawl started, with tables going over.

[Q] Playboy: A cop arrested you in your own house last year during a loud party. You apparently put up some kind of fight and were carried off. What happened?

[A] Willis: My lifestyle just didn't coincide with the lifestyle of my neighbors. The short strokes are: We were having a party on Memorial Day, and the police arrived around ten P.M. We were swimming and dancing out in the back yard by the pool, and nobody heard the doorbell. By the time I got out of the pool, this one cop was already in my house, and I asked him why he was there. I said, "I won't talk to you until you get out of my house," because he didn't have a warrant and I felt invaded. And it just escalated. I was cursing at him and he took offense. "Why are you saying fuck so much?" he said. "What is this, courtesy class? This is how I talk; I'm from New York." This guy was sensitive. He said, "I've arrested more important people than you. You think you're going to get away with this?"

[A] All we were doing was dancing. It was fucking Memorial Day—how are you supposed to celebrate it? But the cop had a point to make. His point was, actors are not above the law. He was thrust into a situation that I'm sure he saw was potentially dangerous. I had a broken shoulder at the time, and my friends tried to tell him about it. He put the handcuffs on me and cranked my arm up around my back, like you see on TV. I heard it go snick, snick, snick—it broke again. And it was chaos. I was yelling in pain, my friends were yelling that I was in pain, and the cop felt threatened, so he called in more cops. One of my friends was arrested for asking what precinct we were going to. But I never assaulted him. No one got hurt, and all the charges were dropped. It certainly gave the press a lot to write about. I've been told that this cop now goes around telling people that he's the one who arrested me. If it hadn't been me, he would have just said, "Turn the music down."

[Q] Playboy: How soon after that did you leave the neighborhood?

[A] Willis: I moved out of that house that night. Never went back after I got arrested. I was still into my swinging bachelorhood at that time, so my goal was to try to find another place where I could play loud music and party without any neighbors around. I found this place up in Mulholland that had its own little canyon. I bought my own six-acre canyon. I had all these fantasies of retribution. I fantasized this conversation I would have with my neighbors: "Oh, hi, Mr. Willis. What are those structures down there at the bottom of the canyon, guesthouses?" "No, they ain't guesthouses." "What are they?" "Speakers."

[Q] Playboy: Guess we can add playing loud music to that list of kicking ass, talking loud and stomping around Hollywood.

[A] Willis: I was reading somewhere about what men like and what women don't like. It said women never like to hear music played at full volume. For some reason, guys like that. One story that typifies my attitude after what happened at my Nichols Canyon house: I had this stereo; the volume control went from zero to ten. One night, I yelled to my friends, "Turn it up!" "We can't, Bruce, it's on ten." So we got a big butane lighter and tried to burn the little plastic piece above the volume control, so we could push the volume up higher. I did like to play the music loud.

[A] But that whole incident with the police was just God's way of saying slow down. Me and my friends lived like we were 16 and had money. We were reliving our youth. And I defy you to find any man who—if given that opportunity—would not take advantage of it. At that time, I was just having everything handed to me. I was like a kid who was never given anything and then given a toy store and told, "It's all yours." There's no mystery to living like that, to living hard and partying.

[Q] Playboy: You were living like that long before you got the toy store. Weren't you busted for dope in college?

[A] Willis: Possession of marijuana, yeah. I rolled two joints, stuck one behind each ear, had a beer in my hand and was going to my friend's house. I was on the street when a cop stopped me for having a beer in my hand. He reached up behind my ear and goes, "What's this?" I said, "Oops, that's a joint." Slapped the cuffs on me and marched me down to the police station.

[Q] Playboy: And then?

[A] Willis: I was put on probation for six months. At that time, things were really starting to mellow about possession.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still smoke marijuana?

[A] Willis: I stopped this year. It was just time to let it go. I'd done it all. I did PCP in high school. For kids coming out now, there is so much more negative information about what those things do to you. Hard and fast facts about them. We didn't have any information at all; it was kind of hushed up in the Sixties and Seventies. And for a long time, as an out-of-work actor in New York, I had this code of "I'm an actor and nothing else matters but my work." Which gives you a built-in reason to get high if you don't get work. It was escaping the reality of not having any gratification.

[A] Disappointment is very easily numbed by a couple of joints or a couple of drinks. I just don't have any need to experiment anymore. I am on the most incredible high right now without having to take any drugs or to pick up a drink.

[Q] Playboy: Is that one of the reasons you stopped doing Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler commercials?

[A] Willis: I started to question why I was doing them. Did I want to continue being a spokesperson for this company? It was time to move on. When Seagram's and I reached a decision by mutual consent not to continue making commercials about its Golden Wine Cooler, it just so happened to coincide with a personal choice I had made to not drink anymore. I felt that I could not morally promote something that I didn't do any longer myself. Seagram's completely understood that. I know there have been things said—that I was very uncooperative, that I wasn't helping and that I was bossing people around. They are not true at all; we had a great time. I was proud of my work. In two years' time, those commercials took it from number five to number one in sales.

[Q] Playboy: It was also extremely lucrative for you, since you earned between $5,000,000 and $7,000,000 for those commercials.

[A] Willis: You betcha.

[Q] Playboy: Was it difficult turning away from that kind of deal?

[A] Willis: How many millions of dollars do you have to have? I'm making so much money now. I'm making multiple millions of dollars a year. The big thing in the press now is how much money I am making. I'd rather have them talk about my work, good or bad. I'd rather have them talk about what kind of an actor I am than what kind of a wage earner.

[Q] Playboy: Since you brought it up, you made an almost ridiculous sum of money for Die Hard. Studio chief Alan Ladd, Jr., was quoted as saying that your getting $5,000,000 throws the business out of whack.

[A] Willis: I was offered that money; I didn't put a gun to anyone's head. They were using me as a scapegoat. There were comparisons in that article: "If we have to pay Bruce Willis for this film, what, then, does Michael Douglas get for his next movie?" Well, what should I do? Say, "OK, don't give me the $5,000,000. Give me what Michael Douglas got on his last film"? You get what you can when you can. How do you turn it down? Do you say, "Oh, no, I don't think I deserve that much"? This business, like many other businesses, is, Get what you can today. All that shit about saving for a rainy day, live for tomorrow and save it up for when you are older is bullshit. You don't know if you're going to be here tomorrow.

[Q] Playboy: So what do you spend the "multiple millions" on?

[A] Willis: I spend money on clothes. And I have a few cars: a '48 Buick Roadmaster that I'm restoring, a couple of Mercedeses, a '66 Corvette that I put money into. The '66 was the best Corvette made; it was when they figured out everything that needed to be figured out about Corvettes—how the suspension should work, the drive—and they really worked all the bugs out of that body style. In '68, they started fucking around with it, changing the fiberglass and the design. The new Corvette is a piece of shit.

[Q] Playboy: Just so we deal with all the rumors: You supposedly had some tough battles with your co-star on Moonlighting, Cybill Shepherd. How bad did it get?

[A] Willis: The worst it got was when, because of the nature of the script, we both had to fight in character. So we would literally be going at each other. And we both have very strong feelings about how our characters should be played, and we got into spats and arguments about that. But it never really got vicious or bloodthirsty. It certainly made good copy to say that Cybill and I were fighting, throwing things at each other, storming off the set and all that other horseshit. It doesn't sell anything to say that Bruce and Cybill are getting along. But people are going to buy the paper that says, "Cybill calls Bruce a Pig."

[Q] Playboy: So, to set the record straight, you've never hit her?

[A] Willis: [Laughs] No, I never laid a glove on her. No one ever hit anybody, no one ever threw anything at anybody. And I don't think either of us has a shorter fuse than the other. I've been known to go off at the drop of a hat, and so has she. But a lot of that's mellowed. We have more time behind us now than we have ahead of us. And we've created a body of work that we are both very proud of. It's like a marriage, a forced marriage. We have to work with each other, because we have contracts, no matter how we feel about each other. And I'll admit, there were days when I'd come to work and I did not want to work with her. Did not want to talk to her. But we did it. I'm sure there were days when I really annoyed her and she didn't want to see me or talk to me.

[Q] Playboy: She's on record as saying that she went to a therapist to make sure your kind of guy wouldn't be in her life anymore. What kind of guy was she talking about?

[A] Willis: Actors. People in show business. I read the article in which she said that. That is something that reflects more on her choice of men now and on her choice of men in the past.

[Q] Playboy: When Newsweek ran a cover story on you two, it said there was a sexual chemistry between you and Cybill that was "potent enough to curl Plexiglas." Are you implying here that sexual attraction can be faked?

[A] Willis: You betcha.

[Q] Playboy: So any chemistry between you is between your characters?

[A] Willis: I've been asked that question a lot. Everybody has a different viewpoint of what chemistry is. But it's not like we sit down and say, "Let's make some chemistry happen." It's something that's created by the combination of our two personalities. But I'm not David Addison. There are elements of me that are like David Addison, but he's a character.

[Q] Playboy: Who is David Addison, and what parts of him are you?

[A] Willis: At times, he can be the Peter Pan of the modern world. There is a party going on inside his head and behind his eyes all the time. And if you understand the party, you're accepted. If you don't understand, you're still accepted, but he's going to try to get you to come to his party. And if you do understand and still don't want to come, he's going to find a way to make you come. Or bring the party to you. He has a code that's sometimes mystical, sometimes very obvious. He hides behind his humor and uses it as a weapon and a shield. And ultimately, he never wants to grow up. David Addison is the kind of guy who wants to have babies so that he can sit around and play with all the toys again that he never threw away. The innate part of me that is him is that fun-loving, chance-taking, risk-taking guy, who, in the face of insurmountable odds or adversity, laughs and finds a way out of it.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anyone after whom you styled him?

[A] Willis: I stole a lot of stuff from Cary Grant. And Bob Hope and Preston Sturges—from that style of comedy. We all steal from everybody. The Three Stooges, I like their stuff.

[Q] Playboy: And is the secret of Addison's appeal that, as you've said in the past, he is beyond cool? What does that mean?

[A] Willis: There's the type-A kind of cool, which is people who try to be cool and are very aware of being cool. Then there's the type-B cool, which is people who are cool in spite of themselves and aren't even aware of it. There's no thought given to it; it's just their slant on life. That's what I meant when I said that David Addison is beyond cool. He doesn't give a shit whether people think he's cool or not. That lack of caring is the ultimate cool. Just be yourself.

[Q] Playboy: David Addison has been characterized as a postfeminist hero—cool, hardboiled, a throwback to Bogart, Cagney, Wayne, chauvinistic.

[A] Willis: That's what the first year was about. He was much more of a chauvinist than he is now. But I've grown as a character and as a human being in the past three years. I don't think that he's dead in David Addison, but to play a guy with a hard-on for three years is nowhere near as interesting as to play one who has grown in spite of himself.

[Q] Playboy: One of the innovative things you did on the show was to "break the fourth wall" and talk directly to the audience. How did that come about?

[A] Willis: We did it as a goof one time, and it got a big laugh, so we snuck it in every once in a while. It became one of the signatures of the show. If you'll notice, we never had Maddie Hayes break the fourth wall, because she represents different elements of the show. But in the big playpen of David Addison's world, that's included. Addressing the audience and letting it in on his little secrets are part of the show. See, we've pulled off things that people said would never work. I'm not really interested in people's hypotheses of what would happen if Maddie and David married or in people who were saying that if Maddie and David screwed, the show would go off the air. Or if they lived together, or if they fell in love. We've continually proved people wrong. And at times, we've pissed 'em off, and I feel real glad about that, that we don't do a show that's predictable.

[A] When we did the episode where Maddie comes back from Chicago and says her child is not my baby and she's married, we had incredible phone calls and mail. One woman who called said she'd never watch the show again; her husband had stormed into the bedroom in anger and she had cried for an hour. I just wanted to tell her, "Wake up and smell the coffee. It's just a TV show."

[Q] Playboy: Do you watch much TV yourself?

[A] Willis: TV, for the most part, bores the shit out of me. TV is not about quality work as much as it is about selling things. I watch sports and movies on my VCR. I like to watch the religious stuff to get material—that's the most well-paid circus in this country. But I don't watch much TV Once, I was flipping through the channels and I saw a scene between Linda Evans and Joan Collins. They were in a burning fucking room for ten minutes! One of them was knocked out and the other one was trying to drag her out, then some guy came crashing in.... Anybody with any common sense knows that he'd be dead in about ten seconds if he were in a burning room! But they were acting up a storm. That is pretty representative of what soaps are.

[Q] Playboy: Would you argue that having David and Maddie go at it in a hospital room while another woman gives birth is more real?

[A] Willis: No, but we don't try to tell people it's real life. It's about a joke. Now, we don't always get to the joke, but we always tip you off that it's not a real situation. The nature of our show is, we do screwball things, we ask you to suspend your disbelief and join us in the joke. We're not really detectives. If you look at I Love Lucy in a TV guide, it gives you the synopsis in a sentence: "Lucy wants to buy a new dress but doesn't want Ricky to find out about it." And they do a whole half hour about that. And that's what we do. We come up with emotional conflict and do a story about it. Our only criterion is that we try to entertain.

[Q] Playboy: That has been a criticism of the show this past season—that it has become less entertaining. Was Cybill's real-life pregnancy a problem for the show?

[A] Willis: When Cybill got pregnant, the show was forced to go in a direction that we were all unprepared to go in, because it was so sudden. There was a lot of catch-up writing in trying to fit puzzle pieces into a shape that they wouldn't accept. Glenn [Caron, the show's creator] went away and did a film while Cybill was down. So did I. Our focus went in different directions. But we've gotten back to what initially intrigued people about the show: that clash of personalities, that sexual tension and emotional jeopardy between me and her.

[Q] Playboy: Why are there fewer episodes of Moonlighting than there are of other hour programs? And why does it cost per episode more than any other program?

[A] Willis: Because we spend more time making it good. It certainly is not the cartoons that, say, Stephen Cannell puts out, where you have dialog, dialog, dialog, chase scene, dialog, dialog, dialog, explosion! Dialog, dialog, dialog, big chase scene. They punch those things out like cookie cutters, and they make millions of dollars in syndication. It's a thriving business, but it certainly doesn't interest me. We broke a lot of those rules, because we had a commitment to producing a quality show.

[Q] Playboy: What does ABC think about that?

[A] Willis: ABC doesn't give a shit about quality. When given a choice between quality and consistency, they'd rather have consistency. Brandon Stoddard [ABC president] has not once, in the three and a half years that we've been doing the show, come down and said hello to either me or Cybill. Which I don't understand. I don't get it. Moonlighting is one of their few good shows. We've had consistently good ratings, and for a network that should be very concerned about its ratings, it hasn't given us a whole lot of support.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds like disillusionment is setting in.

[A] Willis: There have been times right in the middle of this monstrous, white-hot hit show when we started thinking about how long we had on our contracts, and there was no end in sight.

[Q] Playboy: How long do you have?

[A] Willis: Five years. We have two more full seasons. The question that's coming up now is when do we decide that we've run out of things to say? Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore and Carl Reiner did 50-some episodes, and then they finally said one year, "That's it. We've said everything we wanted to say; let's walk away." I would certainly not like to see the show go on so long that we crank 'em out just to get product on the air. I think there is going to come a time when we will run out of situations to put these people in.

[Q] Playboy: Any more TV in your future?

[A] Willis: If I have my way, Moonlighting will be the last TV I do for a long time. I've explored this medium as much as I care to; I feel constrained. There are no surprises for me anymore.

[Q] Playboy: You're in a pretty frank frame of mind. Have you been in therapy?

[A] Willis: Yeah. In the past eight months, I've really been challenging myself, making myself look at things that I refused to look at for a long, long time. About my childhood. It's very easy not to look at those things; it takes courage. I've spent a huge part of my life so far with self-constructed walls around me, to protect myself from myself. I've gotten brave enough to start knocking them down, but they are not all down yet, not by any means.

[Q] Playboy: What did your childhood lack?

[A] Willis: I don't remember there being a lot of closeness in my family. There was a lot of isolation, separation. There wasn't lot of hugging going on.

[Q] Playboy: How did your parents meet?

[A] Willis: My father met my mother in Germany; he was stationed there in the early Fifties. They went out, fooled around; my mother got pregnant with me. My father did the right thing, brought his bride to this country, to New Jersey.

[Q] Playboy: Were your parents strict?

[A] Willis: No stricter than anybody else's. I grew up when long hair first became a thing-it was 1969 and I was in the eighth grade. My father was against long hair, to the point of sending me back to the barber to make sure I got it cut.

[Q] Playboy: You also grew up with a stutter, didn't you?

[A] Willis: I had a terrible stutter part of the time I was in grammar school and when I was in high school, from the time I was about ten until I was 17. It was based on psychological things, on fears, on self-worth, on how I viewed myself. It came out of a fear of not being good enough, of having something wrong with me. Just fear of the world, of my place in the world.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get rid of it?

[A] Willis: As I started to take more responsibility and stand on my own two feet, it started to fade. I got some help from a speech therapist my first year in college.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of help?

[A] Willis: Just relaxation exercises. He would make me start with my toes and relax every joint and muscle in my body and then have me talk. It was impossible to stutter. The interesting part is that whenever I acted, I didn't stutter.

[Q] Playboy: Because you weren't you?

[A] Willis: I think that's what it was.... I know that's what it was. Pretending that I wasn't me. A big part of my sense of humor came out of my stuttering, in trying to overcome that and have some dignity. I said, "Yes, I stutter, but I can make you laugh."

[Q] Playboy: What was your own greatest laugh as a kid?

[A] Willis: I streaked. I was the only streaker in my town. Probably one of the hardest laughs I'll ever laugh in my life was doing that. I had an accomplice who dropped me off and who waited for me at the street corner. It was on Broad and Main, the hub of the metropolis. And there was a newspaper photographer somebody had tipped off. I had on sunglasses and sneakers.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever done anything like that since?

[A] Willis: We moon here occasionally. The first year, we used to give the Blue Moon Award. We would moon the directors. Cybill was a great sport. She just said, "Warn me when you're going to do it."

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to your childhood, how did you and your brothers and sister deal with your parents' separation? You were 16.

[A] Willis: We all dealt with it in different ways. It's a rending, tearing thing. I chose to live with my father, and I pretty much started taking care of myself.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel closer to your dad? Did you feel that he was getting the short end of it?

[A] Willis: That's not something I feel comfortable talking about.

[Q] Playboy: When you started acting, did your parents come to see you?

[A] Willis: Occasionally. They never really understood what it was all about. I come from a long line of blue-collar people; My grandfather, my father and all my uncles owned a machine shop that I grew up around. When I was 13, I started working there in the summertime. I learned how to repair small engines. When I was 14, I knew how to weld. So I guess I've got something to fall back on.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like growing up in Carneys Point, New Jersey?

[A] Willis: It was a cool place to grow up. You drive a half hour one way and you're in an urban environment, a half hour another way and you're in the middle of farmland. So I had those two worlds when I was growing up. Everybody worked for the chemical factories along the Delaware River—Du Pont, Monsanto, Dow. But there is no growth there. Carneys Point is now a sad little town, curling up and dying.

[Q] Playboy: You worked for a while at Du Pont, didn't you?

[A] Willis: Yeah, and I witnessed a terrible accident and decided to leave. A guy got blown up. I was about a mile away, and I saw the explosion. It was a big drum, about the size of a house, in which they mixed chemicals. This guy happened to be driving a truck past the building, which I also drove by ten times a day.

[A] Then I got a job as a security guard at a nuclear-power-plant construction site during the winter, working 12 to eight, $2.80 an hour. I was walking outdoors in the snow with these keys, making sure that it was safe. It was a pretty weird environment. I used to go 300 feet underground to a nuclear container to hit these keys that punched a time clock. It was very spooky.

[Q] Playboy: What did you get out of high school?

[A] Willis: High school helped my acting a great deal, because it taught me how to lie with a straight face. I'd cut class and go back and get snagged by the assistant principal, and he'd look right at me and I'd say, "Just went out to my car to get a book." It taught me how to beat the system. What it didn't teach me was common sense. It didn't teach me communication skills. How to deal with conflict. How to balance my checkbook. It didn't teach me anything about life. No one talked about racism at my school—and we suffered from race riots every year that I went there. When I was a senior, I was expelled for two months, along with 50 other students, for inciting a riot. It was more about 17- and 18-year-olds needing to fight than it was about race relations. My father hired a lawyer and I got back into school.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get into a lot of fights?

[A] Willis: I kicked some ass. I got my ass kicked, too. In the ninth grade, I got beaten up by a gang of kids who were the bad, bad guys. White kids. They were all drunk, and they just needed to kick somebody's ass and I was there. I seem to remember crying. My father was pretty taciturn about it. His philosophy was, Don't start fights, but if you get into one, fight to win.

[Q] Playboy: So you learned to fight in the streets. What about sex?

[A] Willis: Learned on my own, trial and error. I first kissed a girl in the second grade, stole a kiss from her; man, I was bold. We used to kiss in the sixth grade, when I was 12. I had girlfriends as soon as guys were supposed to start having them.

[Q] Playboy: What happened the first time you touched a girl's breasts?

[A] Willis: Everything else of importance to my life at that time ceased to exist. It was unbelievable. I was 13.

[Q] Playboy: How did you learn to masturbate?

[A] Willis: How do fish know how to swim upstream? I took to masturbation like a duck to water. Any guy tells you he didn't is lying. Man, it was like—phew! Doing this? Gives you that? Yo! Spent a lot of time in the shower in those years.

[Q] Playboy: And when did you actually put it all together?

[A] Willis: I was about 14 and had a job as a bellboy at a Holiday Inn. There was a guy who worked as a night clerk on the weekends who was out of high school. He would bring all his friends in and have a party. I stopped in at one, and this chick scooped me up; she snagged me. I had a pass key to all the rooms, so we went down into the laundry room, and she kind of led me through it. I was amazed that it was happening. It was like—boom! "You came? Oh, good." I walked out of the laundry room whistling the theme from The Godfather. I had a whole new step. I tracked this girl down once more a week later; I just had to do it again, because it was the most incredible experience in my life. And the really difficult thing was that I didn't get laid again for, like, six months, so I was dying.

[Q] Playboy: Guys say that at a certain point in their lives, they would do anything, say anything to get laid. Was that true of you?

[A] Willis: For a big part of a young guy's life, getting laid is the most important thing there is. There is no mystery about that. Most guys don't start getting laid on a regular basis until they are 17, 18, some guys even later. But from the time you are 18 until whenever the novelty wears off, getting laid is it. And whatever it takes, you do. Yeah, I've lied and I've been lied to. While I choose not to lie now, I remember when I did lie.

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever afraid of women?

[A] Willis: There was a woman I feared who ran this restaurant where I worked as a bus boy in college. An unbelievable incarnation of flesh and tight girdles and all this shit. She was just the most incredibly tough bitch, broad, Gestapo. And I had the kind of personality that would always get to her. She'd be standing there railing at me, and I'd smile at her and bust her up. Man, she was tough. I just think she needed to get fucked. Which is a pretty sexist thing to say. This woman did need to get fucked. I don't think that's what all women need, but this woman needed to get fucked.

[Q] Playboy: What were your best pickup lines?

[A] Willis: The first one is not a line at all, it's just ignoring someone. Got a lot of mileage out of that one. You can make even the worst pickup line work if you say it funny enough. I used to say, "Hi, can I buy you a Cadillac?" Or "OK, you, me, right now; we'll get married; get your stuff."

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that you once lived with two women in New York?

[A] Willis: Yeah, two sisters. They were friends. They came into where I was tending bar one night and said they were getting kicked out of their apartment, and at that time, I wasn't making a whole lot of money, so I said, "Come live with me." And they did. They moved all their stuff in and stayed for nine months. We all slept in the same bed. Nobody fooled around.

[Q] Playboy: You must be joking.

[A] Willis: They were good friends. We worked it out.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you once say you looked upon women as an art form?

[A] Willis: The ultimate art form. When you consider all the ways in which a woman's body has been expressed in art, in every medium—sculpting, painting, photography, film, TV and from a very obscene way like Hustler to Venus di Milo—it's a timeless art form. The beauty of a woman's body is breath-taking.

[Q] Playboy: And what women have taken your breath away?

[A] Willis: Modern women? Marilyn Monroe killed me. Young Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas destroyed me; I was dying. Young Barbara Stanwyck, young Katharine Hepburn. I have quite a crush on Meryl Streep; in Sophie's Choice, she staggered me. Anjelica Huston's definitely a killer.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that the first time you tested with Cybill, you told her you couldn't do it, because she was too beautiful?

[A] Willis: What I said to her was, "I'm really kind of embarrassed talking to you. Because you are so pretty to look at, it's hard for me to concentrate." We were flirting. It was very thrilling for me to be working with her. She's a star. She was a real professional and she really helped me through it.

[Q] Playboy: Before you tested with her, though, you were competing against thousands of other actors for the role of David Addison. How did you get it?

[A] Willis: I had screen tested with Madonna in New York for Desperately Seeking Susan and I didn't get the part, so I decided to go to L.A. and take a vacation. My L.A. agents started sending me out on things, and one of them was Moonlighting. It was the last day, they had been casting for months and months, in ten cities, in Canada, and saw, like, 3000 actors for the part. And I knew nothing about it. I read the script sitting in a bar on Pico Boulevard and laughed my ass off. I said, "I can do this." I had a real cavalier attitude about auditioning. So I went in and said, "Let's do it." Did it, said "Adiós" and walked right out before they could talk with me. Cybill had been cast, but I hadn't met her yet. The casting people started talking about other actors they had seen that day, and Glenn Caron said, "Wait a minute. That's the guy, the guy who just left. That's David Addison." And they said, "What the fuck you talking about? We don't see it." Glenn did. He is the driving force behind the creative quality of the show. He had faith in me when no one else did. It took them eight weeks to persuade ABC to hire me. I did a Miami Vice and went back to New York. By that time, the audition process had gotten to the point where if I didn't get the part, there would be no Moonlighting and the show would be canceled, because they didn't have anybody else they wanted to use. My agent called and said, "It's over, you're out; the show's not going to be done." Glenn Caron called me the next night and said, "There's been a mistake; if you fly out and screen test on Wednesday, I think you'll get the part." I flew out and by Friday, I was cast.

[Q] Playboy: When Henry Winkler was playing The Fonz, George C. Scott prophetically told him he might never get another part as good as that one. Did anyone ever say anything like that to you about David Addison?

[A] Willis: After the pilot had aired, I bumped into Paul Michael Glaser, who said, "Try as hard as you can to enjoy your anonymity, man, because in a finite number of days, it's going to be gone and you'll never get it back again." And he was absolutely right. I didn't really know what he meant at that point, because I was still thinking in very small terms.

[Q] Playboy: The show was immediately accepted by critics and the public as offbeat, different. How did you see it?

[A] Willis: The show is in a class by itself. Shows like it come along seldom. There are a couple of shows that have a similar quality—Hill Street Blues, which had that straight-ahead, action-packed, deadpan delivery, and St. Elsewhere, which was a similar show. No one has really been able to copy Moonlighting so far.

[Q] Playboy: One reason being the amount of talking you and Cybill do.

[A] Willis: Yeah, we average 40,000 or 50,000 words each year—we counted them! It's just a lot of jabbering, man. It is not a big action show, it's a lot of character and a lot of dialog. And it can grind you down.

[Q] Playboy: You say you want to do only movies from now on. After the so-so reception of Blind Date and the failure of Sunset, you had a lot riding on Die Hard—not to mention the studio's $5,000,000. Did you ever have any thoughts that Die Hard might not succeed?

[A] Willis: No, I was proud of my work in Die Hard—though I was proud of my work in Sunset, too. But it's strange: From the coverage of that film that I've seen, it's obvious that now the emphasis is truly on how much money a film makes. It has nothing to do with content, with how good it is.

[Q] Playboy: What movie actors do you model yourself after?

[A] Willis: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro—the less-is-more school, the behavior as opposed to the presentation of the work. Dog Day Afternoon was an amazing film. Scarface was a brilliant movie, one of Pacino's best. De Niro in The Deer Hunter, there's a scene where they are up in the mountains and he holds up this fucking shell and says, "Hey, this is this, ain't nothin' else. From now on, you're on your own." It was mystical to me. I wanted to know that guy with that line. His work continually amazes me, how hard he strives to create a living, breathing person in each role. I would like to be directed by him. And Jack Nicholson is enormous. I would like to play a part of the same stature as the one he played as Eugene O'Neill in Reds. I think Sean Penn's work is really honest, and he strives not to repeat himself. I like actors who don't always make safe choices. Bill Hurt is a great example, and he pulls it off. Robert Duvall. Meryl Streep is the greatest living actor that America has, man or woman. Her stuff exemplifies what's important to me in acting.

[Q] Playboy: Besides Streep, are there other women with whom you'd like to work?

[A] Willis: Diane Keaton. Barbra Streisand. Madonna. I would have loved to work with Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck. I had an enormous crush on Stanwyck. The Lady Eve is one of my all-time favorite movies. There's a love scene in there where no one actually touches—she caresses Henry Fonda's face—but it's one of the hottest scenes without love's ever being consummated.

[Q] Playboy: You had some bizarre scenes with Kim Basinger in your first film, Blind Date. How did you feel about that one?

[A] Willis: I felt I'd finally arrived, starring in a major film. And for a first film, I was very happy with it, even if it was a one-joke film about a blind date. My role was one of a reactor and not the motivating force. I'm a better driver of a scene than I am a reactor, the person who is being done to. In Blind Date, Kim Basinger was the driver; she was the one doing all the crazy stuff that I was reacting to. Personally, I like my own work more as a driver.

[Q] Playboy: You were cast in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket but turned it down. Why?

[A] Willis: Because I got the call from his office two days before we were to start shooting the first six episodes of Moonlighting. I was crushed. I'd always been a student of the Vietnam war. As it turned out, it took them two years to complete the film and get it out, so everything happens for a reason.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe that anything positive came out of Vietnam?

[A] Willis: It woke a lot of people up to the fact that the Government had been lying to the public for a lot longer than we thought. Lyndon Johnson lied. Richard Nixon said they weren't going to bomb Hanoi, and there were saturation bombings. That information sobered a lot of people. Unfortunately, it took 50,000 lives to learn that lesson. And we're still fucking savages.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Willis: We're only steps removed from the fucking Roman gladiators' slashing one another with swords. Look, we're 40 years away from dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, from Hitler's killing 6,000,000 Jews. And when was the last time you heard anything about what this country did to the Indians? We just shoved them under the carpet like they were dirt. And all of this was theirs, all 3000 miles of it.

[A] That's why I say we are still savages. For Ronald Reagan to say that we are going to restart development of germ warfare—it's like his head is spinning around like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. What can he be thinking? It just boggles the fucking mind! That's why I believe in a higher power—that there is much more intelligent life in the universe that is watching us like we would watch animals, seeing what the hell we're doing.

[Q] Playboy: Then you think aliens are watching us?

[A] Willis: Absolutely. There is too much evidence to ignore. But if you talk with the majority of people out there about this stuff, smoke starts coming out of their ears and their eyes start rolling.

[Q] Playboy: And would you go if they shone their light on you?

[A] Willis: In a minute. I used to stand up on the roof of my apartment in New York with a fairly tasty buzz on and say, "Take me!"

[Q] Playboy: For the sake of argument, let's say that doesn't happen and you're forced to live out your days on this planet. How does that prospect suit you?

[A] Willis: I sincerely care about what is going to happen. I'm fat and wealthy and I'm very concerned. We are literally destroying the planet. We are cutting off all the life-support systems—the water and the air—with no heed for what it's going to be like 20 years from now. We pour toxic chemicals into the ground; we hide them. You can't drink the water in L.A. now; you can't eat the fish that come out of the Santa Monica Bay; there's a hole in the ozone layer the size of the United States, because people need to drink things out of Styrofoam cups. And no one is talking about the shape the planet is in.

[A] You know, one accident, one oil spill, can fuck up 25 years. They say, "We'll be careful." Well, I'm sure the people in Chernobyl tried to be as careful as they could. And this whole thing about the Russians' being our enemies, Reagan calling them the evil empire. Fucking Gorbachev wants to stop fighting, but every time he says so, our Government goes, "They're lying Communists." That's right out of the Fifties, man. That's thinking from 30 fucking years ago! The clock is ticking.

[Q] Playboy: We didn't realize that wild man Bruno was secretly a Sixties idealist.

[A] Willis: I was apolitical for a long time. The closest we ever came to turning it around was the Kennedy era. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.—they wanted to help people. And the major corporations who handle the defense contracts and who don't give a shit about people who have to work for a living killed them. So they buy politicians now. They are setting up Bush to be the next President, who will continue Reagan's money-making plans. This country needs a leader who can say, "I want to help the people." Then his problem would be staying alive. What we really need to go into office is a powerful young Government that says, "Let's start over." I need a leader.

[Q] Playboy: Anyone in mind?

[A] Willis: Tom Hayden. He once said he'd never be elected to national public office, much less the Presidency, because of all the Sixties baggage he carries, but I think he's a sincere man. A lot of people who cared in the Sixties are coming of age now. I also think Jack Kemp has said some interesting things about waste in Government.

[Q] Playboy: Hayden and Kemp—that's interesting. You've said you read a lot. When did that begin?

[A] Willis: In the seventh grade, when I read a textbook on mythology. And then I read Great Expectations in a week. I was mesmerized by Dickens. Reading is one of the joys in my life. I've read Tolkien's trilogy at least 15 times. His work is so rich in detail; he not only creates a wonderful epic story, he creates a religion, languages, heroic qualities that strike a deep chord in me. I can open those books now at any place and know right where I am. I read a lot of William Kotzwinkle—I've optioned The Fan Man. He has a wild imagination. I also own Elmore Leonard's Bandits. I like Truman Capote. T. Coraghessan Boyle. Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides really shook me up. I read John Irving's Garp cover to back and then started over. Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is great. Arthur C. Clarke's great. I love Damon Runyon's Broadway stories. I couldn't put Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove down. I don't think I've ever been moved as much by a modern writer. He really paints characters well. I was also moved by Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest; I read that five times. And I still read Shakespeare, just to hear myself say a different language.

[Q] Playboy: What about musical influences?

[A] Willis: I grew up with the Philadelphia sound and Motown. I listen to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mott the Hoople, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix. My favorite album is Foxtrot, by Genesis, Peter Gabriel's group. Best jazz is Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Best country-western singer: Merle Haggard. Best pop: David Bowie, Sting. Best rock and roll: Led Zeppelin. Best voices in the world: Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett.

[Q] Playboy: What about yourself? How do you rate your own voice?

[A] Willis: I've never been really happy with the sound of my voice. I'm more a hollerer than a singer. Sinatra sings, I holler loudly in key. But I was the first white artist ever to sign with Motown, and my album ended up doing well; but if I had my way, I would have scrapped a bunch of the stuff on the album and started over with my new knowledge about how to approach it. But I would have done the album for free; it was just a fun thing to do.

[Q] Playboy: What has been your greatest musical thrill?

[A] Willis: Sitting next to Ray Charles on the piano bench and having him play You Don't Know Me to just the crew. That was the coolest thing. That's my ace number-one thrill of all time.

[Q] Playboy: And here we thought you'd say it was the day you got Little Richard to perform your marriage ceremony.

[A] Willis: Yeah, he performed the ceremony, but he was very subdued. Everybody's first impression was that he was going to come in and be Little Richard.

[Q] Playboy: How did you choose him?

[A] Willis: We just heard he was available. He's ordained. It made it really special. It was a great wedding.

[Q] Playboy: It was actually your second wedding to Demi, wasn't it?

[A] Willis: Yeah, it was more a celebration of the first wedding. We got married first in Las Vegas. We wanted to keep the ceremony very private, something that only we had, that we owned, that was ours forever. The last thing we wanted was to remember our wedding day with helicopters flying over the house and people trying to get at us. So we did it exactly how we wanted: We had two friends there, one of Demi's and one of mine. And this lady married us. It was very special and very loving. And the second wedding was a ceremony that Demi and I both wrote. We wrote a song. And each came up with 13 of our closest friends. All my guys got together and sang the song we wrote as they came up the aisle. And Little Richard performed the ceremony, and then we threw a great party. We rented a sound stage. I danced at my own wedding.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet Demi?

[A] Willis: At a screening of a movie. When we were introduced, I didn't really pay all that much attention to her; my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about getting into the theater with a minimum of hassle. But when I bumped into her again later that night, it was like—boing! And we were together after that all the time.

[Q] Playboy: Was it immediate for her as well?

[A] Willis: She came along a little slower. She was real hesitant. Prior to meeting her, I had no desire to be in a relationship or fall in love, because I was just healing myself from getting out of a three-year relationship. But when I met her, all that stuff went out the window.

[Q] Playboy: The relationship you were getting out of was with Sheri Rivera. How important was she in your life?

[A] Willis: She helped me a lot. I met her during the final stages of my stay in New York. She was very supportive of me as an actor at a time when no one else was, when I was very singular in my desire to become an actor. She was caring and very loving and understood my desires. She introduced me to people. She helped me get my agent, which eventually led to Moonlighting. So she was a real strong influence. When we broke up, it was hard for both of us. There had been a lot of time invested. It was difficult and painful, but it just wasn't meant to be.

[Q] Playboy: And then along came Demi.

[A] Willis: I guess all the experiences that I've been through brought me to my wife, where I would know enough to love her the way I want to love her. That's what that whole eight months prior to meeting her was about. It was getting it out of my system. I was ready to give up that hard-living lifestyle.

[Q] Playboy: No more temptations?

[A] Willis: I don't think I would have gotten married if I felt that I would still be tempted. I'm very satisfied with my wife. It's my first completely honest relationship. It's a very freeing thing, a great release. I don't have anything to hide anymore, to lie about. She knows all my secrets. I like myself when I'm with her. I'm at my most tender, my most gentle, my most laughing, caring self. I like to hang out with my wife. People say, "What's married life like?" I say, "It's just like real life, only better."

[Q] Playboy: Would you like to act with her?

[A] Willis: I don't think we're going to do it. Once we got married, people started getting the idea, "Let's put them in a movie together!" But we would rather keep the work separate.

[Q] Playboy: Are you planning on having a lot of kids?

[A] Willis: That's what I'm trying to talk her into. I want to get my own Softball team.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think fatherhood will do to you?

[A] Willis: Having a kid will make me a little more mellow. It makes me want to get out of TV, so I can go play with my kid. I would like now to take a couple of years off; Demi can go to work if she wants. I have no problem with that at all. I've been working really hard the past three and a half years, and she wants to work again. A lot of that shit about the man works, the woman stays home in the kitchen has no meaning in my life. It's like a cartoon.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really think you can duck out of the limelight?

[A] Willis: Being in the spotlight, being a household name, is a novelty that has worn off for me. The spotlight's still on and I'm not complaining, but some days, man, it's just hard being me. I would really like to be able to throw a switch just for a short period of time and be anonymous again and let go of all the pressure and the structure and the business that my life has become. And while I know that there is no such switch, I still keep looking for it.

[Q] Playboy: Your friends must help you relieve some of that.

[A] Willis: My friends keep me grounded. They don't put me up on the same pedestal that a lot of other people do, thank God. You could take all this away from me, everything—the money, the fame, the blah-blah-blah, the whole nine yards, man—if I had my friends and my family, I'd be fine.

"People don't want to know how you researched a film, they want to know who you are fucking. I chose not to do that."