(CNN) — Bruce Willis and his family shared some personal news this week and his daughter Scout felt the supportive response.
On Wednesday, his family announced that Willis is stepping away from his career because he has aphasia, which is affecting his cognitive abilities.
Aphasia hinders a person’s ability to communicate, making it difficult for them to comprehend others, write or speak.
Scout Willis, 30, shared a note of gratitude for the supportive messages she received about her dad.
“The exquisite outpouring of love that I am experiencing right now is just blowing me away,” Scout wrote on her Instagram Story. “Thank you all for showing up with so much tenderness and stunning love for my daddio and my whole family.”
Some colleagues of Bruce Willis shared some of their experiences working with the actor in recent years.
Actor Rob Gough, who filmed “American Siege” with Willis in November, told People he feels “honored and blessed” to have worked with him.
“The guy is a legend and just so iconic,” Gough told the publication. “Even without this information [about his diagnosis], just to be on set with the guy was so memorable and so amazing for me. And then, learning about his condition, and that that was going to be one of his last films, I’m so honored and blessed that I got to work with the guy and learn from him.”
“Even though he was going through this when he was on camera — it’s second nature to him, he just turned on, and you had no idea that anything was going on,” Gough said.
Some who have worked with Willis within the last two years have noticed some changes in his health, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Mike Burns, the director of “Out of Death,” worked with Willis on that film in 2020 and said there was a request to shorten the actor’s lines – compressing 25 pages of dialogue into one day of filming.
“After the first day of working with Bruce, I could see it firsthand and I realized that there was a bigger issue at stake here and why I had been asked to shorten his lines,” Burns said.
Jesse V. Johnson told the paper he was a stuntman decades ago when he first worked with Willis.
Johnson, who directed the low-budget film “White Elephant,” said “it was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered” when the pair met up before filming last April.
“He just looked so lost, and he would say, ‘I’ll do my best,'” Terri Martin, the production supervisor on “White Elephant,” said. “He always tried his best.”
CNN has reached out to reps for Willis for comment.
The-CNN-Wire
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