Rumer Willis has spoken out about her dad Bruce Willis’s special relationship with her three-year-old child, Louetta, amid his dementia diagnosis.
The 37-year-old actor opened up about spending quality time with her father — who was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2023 —during a recent episode of Maeve Reilly’s The Inside Edit podcast.
“I love getting to go over and see him,” Rumer, who shares her daughter with ex Derek Richard Thomas, said. “I’m so grateful that I have a child that got to meet him because I don’t know if my sisters will have that. You know, who knows?
“Even though our time together is different now, I’m so grateful still that I have this time,” she continued. “There’s a sweetness. He’s always been this kind of macho dude and there’s like a — fragile is not the right word but — just a tenderness that maybe being Bruce Willis might not have allowed him in a certain way.”
The eldest daughter of Bruce and his ex-wife, Demi Moore, continued: “I’m so grateful for how our family has rallied together in this way.”
“We don’t do it perfectly, but we’re always striving to continue to create connection and find ways to be with each other and support each other through something that is kind of unprecedented,” she said.
When asked how the Die Hard actor was doing, Rumer responded: “It’s such a funny question because it’s like, he’s okay in the context of what his reality is. It will never be the same as it was of having a dad or how it is with my mother.”
Along with Rumer, Moore and Bruce, who were married from 1987 to 2000, share two daughters: Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 32. Bruce married his second wife, Emma Heming Willis, in 2009, and they later welcomed two daughters: Mabel, 14, and Evelyn, 12.
Bruce receives 24-hour care for the degenerative disease and lives separately from Emma and their kids.
Rumer has previously shared updates about her dad’s dementia, saying last November that there are times when he doesn’t remember who she is.
“The truth is that anybody with FTD is not doing great,” she said on Instagram at the time. “But he’s doing okay in terms of somebody who’s dealing with frontotemporal dementia, you know what I mean?
“The only way I feel like I could answer that in a way that’s like he’s doing great… How do I say this? It’s like those parameters don’t really work anymore in my mind, so this is an interesting question.”
Rumer added: “I’m so grateful that when I go over there and give him a hug, whether he recognizes me or not, that he can feel the love I’ve given him, and I can feel it back from him. That I still see a spark of him and he can feel the love that I’m giving and so that feels really nice.”
