Die Hard

 The costume department had 17 undershirts in various stages of degradation on hand for Bruce Willis during the filming of "Die Hard" (1988).

When John McClane runs through the glass shards in his "bare" feet after Hans has his men shoot out the glass partitions in the computer room, Bruce Willis is wearing special shoes designed to look like his own bare feet. One can see this if looking closely as his feet appear quite unnaturally large in some of these crucial "barefoot" scenes.

Willis observed in an interview that many of the real police officers he met with to help prepare for the role and who served as technical advisers on the film all had a very dark, macabre sense of humor, which he tried to factor into his performance. Ironically, action hero characters are often criticized for joking around in films, even though, as Willis himself noted, telling jokes in such dire situations is not that uncommon.

Besides being only a TV star at the time and barely being considered for the role of John McClane (Robert De Niro was the first choice; Willis had just been turned down to play the Charles Grodin role opposite De Niro in "Midnight Run." Coincidentally, both films opened the same weekend), Willis had one more hurdle to overcome. He was one half of the starring duo on "Moonlighting." The film shoot would have coincided with the filming schedule of the show that Willis was contracted to. But series costar, Cybil Shepherd had gotten pregnant around the same time. Filming of the show had to be shut down for 11 weeks, which was perfect for Willis to run around the Nakatomi Plaza.

As he was mainly known for playing a comedic role at the time, when the first trailers for "Die Hard" appeared in cinemas, audiences laughed at seeing Willis and figured that the movie was a comedy. For a brief time, Willis's face was even removed from posters to prevent expectations of it being a comedy, hence the use of the Nakatomi building for the poster. Once the film came out and received a positive response, Willis's face was added back onto the poster.

Ironically, Willis, sneered at for being an all-American hero by the head German terrorist, is actually more German than most of the villains; Alan Rickman was English and Alexander Godunov was Russian. Willis was born on March 19th 1955 in West Germany to an American father and a German mother.