Emma Heming Willis is opening up about her first interaction with now-husband Bruce Willis.
“I met him in, like, 2005, I want to say, 2004, and we met at the gym, like most people in Hollywood do, I guess,” Heming Willis, 50, said on the Wednesday, August 5, episode of Hoda Kotb’s “Making Space” podcast, when asked what drew her to the actor.
She continued, “His time was before mine and we would sort of overlap, and the things that I remember about him was just how warm and charismatic, how funny he was, but [he] always really took the time to want to learn more about me. Just more about who I was, about my life, and prior to that, I had never really thought about Bruce Willis.”
Heming Willis explained that she grew up watching Willis’ 1980s series, Moonlighting, but was “never an action movie fan.”
“So when I had noticed him, I had said to my mother, ‘You know, I met Bruce Willis, and he’s really a lovely man.’ And my mom was like, ‘What are you doing? You’re engaged to be married.’ I said, ‘No, no, no’ — yes, at the time, I was engaged to be married, but I had met him and I just noticed that,” she recalled. “It wasn’t until years later, after my engagement fizzled, thankfully, that we went on our first date, and I just really loved being around him.”
She continued, “It was just something very warm, safe and fun. My husband is just so full of life, and it was a really beautiful time. It was a really great time in our lives.”
Willis, now 71, tied the knot with the model in 2009. The couple went on to welcome daughters Mabel and Evelyn in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
In March 2022, Willis’ family announced that he was diagnosed with aphasia. It was later revealed that the actor’s condition progressed to frontotemporal dementia. (Willis is also the dad of daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 35, and Tallulah, 32, with ex-wife Demi Moore.)
While caring for her husband, Heming Willis has been open about the highs and lows of his health battle, but her love for Willis has never subsided.
“If opposites attract, that couldn’t be more true than for my husband and I. He is very spontaneous. I really like a plan,” Heming Willis explained on Wednesday. “I am very, sort of, type A. I think he really enjoyed life, and it’s not that I didn’t, but I needed structure, so I felt like we, in a way, helped each other. I think that what he has instilled in me today is to be a little bit more spontaneous, have a little more fun, where I can tend to sort of want to put things in a box, but as I’m raising our two young daughters, I really need to bring more of that into our lives.”
She continued, “Fun, off the cuff, a little wild is OK. I really appreciate that, that he has given me that. His saying is ‘Live it up,’ and that’s what I try and remember all the time is, to live it up.”
