Bruce Willis has had a great acting career by anyone's standards, but he still has two major roles he regrets letting slip through his fingers. At 66-years-old, Willis isn't quite as high-profile a star nowadays as he used to be, opting to appear in lots of direct to video action films and thrillers for reasons not entirely clear. He still does hit the big screen though, such as in M. Night Shyamalan's Glass in 2019, Eli Roth's Death Wish remake in 2018, and going a little further back, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For in 2014.

Regardless of his current status though, Willis was at one point one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and held that position for about two decades. His signature character is of course John McClane, a New York City cop who's constantly thrust into extreme situations in the Die Hard franchise. Before that, Willis shot to fame as co-lead of the hit late-1980s dramedy Moonlighting, opposite Cybill Shepherd. Some of Willis' many other blockbuster hits include Armageddon, Pulp Fiction, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, and The Whole Nine Yards.

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Even with a career that successful, it turns out Willis still has some professional regrets, in particular, two big roles he passed on and came to wish he hadn't. Willis revealed the two parts in question during a 2007 Q&A with Ain't It Cool News. The site's readers were allowed to ask Willis whatever they liked, and he was pretty forthcoming in his responses, almost seeming like a precursor to Reddit's "Ask Me Anything" format.

Patrick Swayze in Ghost

The first of Willis' biggest missed role regrets is playing lead character Sam Wheat in Ghost (1990), a role which went to Patrick Swayze. Willis didn't believe the concept of a romantic relationship between a ghost and a living person could work, so he passed, and after seeing the end result, wishes he hadn't. Ghost became a huge hit, and gave Swayze one of his signature roles. Willis also regrets not taking the opportunity to work alongside his then-wife Demi Moore, who played Sam's grieving girlfriend Molly Jensen. In hindsight though, it may have been hard to buy Willis as Sam so soon after his first turn as John McClane, although Swayze was also coming off a gruff action movie in Road House, so maybe not. Willis would of course go on to famously play a ghost in The Sixth Sense.

Bruce Willis' other big regret when it comes to missed roles is from 1996's The English Patient, specifically playing the part of Canadian intelligence operative David "Moose" Caravaggio, which was ultimately played by Willem Dafoe. Willis says he passed on the film due to being talked out of working with director Anthony Minghella by his now former agent. The English Patient went on to win nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and also starred Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Willis has never won or been nominated for an Oscar, and one wonders if the Moose role might've given him that opportunity. To be fair though, Dafoe wasn't nominated for Moose, so perhaps Willis wouldn't have been either.

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