Late summer, and the House of Willis-Moore summer tour of Europe has pitched up in London. Mum — that’s Demi Moore — is at the Corinthia hotel in Charing Cross, promoting her Cannes-wowing body-horror film The Substance, only a few weeks after the actor, and Pilaf the chihuahua, rocked the Dior Homme Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 show.
Moore’s other Paris Fashion Week plus-one — that’s Scout Willis, her musician daughter with ex-husband Bruce Willis — is also here, in town from her home in Los Angeles.
The 33-year-old is en route from a mini vay-cay in Sardinia to an acoustic, six-show pub tour of Ireland. One stop is in Athlone, site of “the oldest pub in the world”. A friend who lives there has been “trying to get me to play Sean’s Bar for three years. It’s been a public house since 500AD, ostensibly. Who knows?” shrugs Willis, cheerfully, rangy limbs flopping in and out of her chair in a Bethnal Green boozer. “I could be full of shit. They could be full of shit. I’m just going with it, though.”
Last night, there was a dinner at the River Café with Moore’s good friend Sir Bob Geldof, and mother and daughter also went to the Almeida to see “deeply moving” play The Years. “There was such an intense depiction of a kitchen-table abortion, this young guy behind us fainted,” says Willis, eyes agog. “It was that visceral.”
No time, though, for Moore’s middle daughter to see any preview screenings of something wildly more visceral. In the gore-and-more The Substance, the 61-year-old actor burns up the screen as Elizabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood star of film and gym who’s sacked on her 50th birthday. In a desperate attempt to keep her celebrity fitness instructor job, Sparkle takes a black market “substance” that reveals her inner beauty. And that’s literally, with a younger, fitter model (played by Margaret Qualley) bursting out of Sparkle’s spine. Think: if Alien did tweakments.
Despite having yet to see the stomach-churning deformities and humiliations that befall Moore’s character’s (largely naked) body, Willis has a sense of what her mother went through on the shoot, “because she was texting me the whole time, sending photos of herself in all of the prosthetics. Mate!” exclaims this extremely matey Anglophile, “it took my mom seven hours to get into the prosthetics — and then she had to be in them all day!” With that level of discomfort, not to mention nudity, “it was very courageous of her. Because it’s really vulnerable and really exposing to do that.”
It certainly was for a woman, once cinema’s highest-paid female actor, who recently explained how she felt that, even in her forties, “there didn’t seem to be a place for me” in Hollywood.
“And that’s what the movie’s about. I thought it was a real act of service for her to do that. Then it’s just amazing, because in truth, she does look so... slammin’!” says Willis, beaming with pride.
Moore, of course, has form in this area. Her 1991 Vanity Fair shoot, in which she appeared naked and heavily pregnant, is one of the all-time iconic magazine covers. Spoiler-alert: that was Scout in there, two months shy of her birth.
“My first cover!” she laughs. “What’s interesting is that people remember how culturally shifting it was. But what they don’t remember is that the article was vicious. My mom really took a lot of heat for these big, culturally significant moves she made — including asking for as much money as her male counterparts. She got so much hate.”
Moore also recently starred in a TikTok posted by Willis. She led her mother and her sisters, Rumer, 36, and Tallulah, 30, in a synchronised dance set to the feelgood, earwormy California rock vibes of her single Over And Over. The singer-songwriter admits that, until recently, she would have avoided both the social media platform and her family ties, with a defiant attitude of: “I want everyone to take me seriously! I’m a musician! Respect that! I’m more than my parents’ child!”
You’ve got to be a really miserable person to talk about my Dad’s health, and about the way we look
But now Willis — proud of her music, with a debut album of bluesy Americana released in 2022 and another due early next year — won’t take nepo for an answer. “Me five years ago would have said, ‘Uh, I’m never making a TikTok dance, or having my mom do something with me.’ But I just thought, f*** it.” Or, as she said in her caption accompanying the post: “I must be God’s favourite nepo baby to have a family who supports me this much.”
Still, the trolls came for the Willis girls. Tallulah duly responded in a since-deleted post: “People always seem shocked when we share how cruel and mean the comments on us have been our whole lives.” I ask Scout, is that true?
“Yeah. I actually asked her to take that down because I feel that that gives more power to those people. Look,” she says, one foot up on her chair and leaning in over our pints, “it is sometimes hard. I’m a person. And I’m a sensitive person. So I’m like, wow, some of these comments are really intense. But the only ones that actually land are ones that tap on fears I secretly have about myself.
“So now I just f***ing delete it. And you know what? You’ve got to be a really miserable person to go out of your way to be cruel, to talk about my dad’s health, to talk about the way my sisters and I look. Man, that sucks.”
Bruce Willis’s health is the one area his daughter is reluctant to discuss in detail. The 69-year-old retired from acting in 2022 after being diagnosed with aphasia. Last year his family revealed a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia.
“That one’s harder for me to...” Willis begins when I ask how her dad is. “There’s moments where it feels easy to share it. And there’s moments where it’s a dystopian, bizarre thing to have to talk about.” What she will say is that her family is “unbelievably loving”, with Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s 1998 split being the model of a respectful, children-focused separation. “They did it in a way that more parents do now, where it’s conscious co-parenting. They had a leg-up on that. They did their absolute Nineties best to do that for themselves. And they definitely didn’t put it on us.”
Equally, she “loves” her stepmother, model-turned-businesswoman Emma Heming, as a “truly inspiring, really strong woman” dealing with the medical challenges facing her husband and their daughters, Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10. “They’re my babies!” says Willis of her half-sisters. “I see them all the time. They’re a big part of my life.
“Obviously, to see a parent ill is [difficult],” she continues. “Either you’ve dealt with it or you haven’t. It’s a club, right? Dead parents, sick parents… It’s something I didn’t think I would have to look at from such a young age. But what is amazing is meeting other people who understand it. People who are like, ‘Would you talk to my friend? Her mom has dementia’. That’s been pretty profound.”
And for all the difficulties, inspired by their parents’ Nineties template, and as evidenced by Tallulah’s TikTok clapback, all the family show up for each other.
I inherited wise-ass charm from my Dad, and deep courage from my Mom
“Big time!” beams Willis. “House of Willis-Moore, ha ha! Yeah, we’ve all done a lot of the work you have to do to clear away old narratives and be super-close as adults. That’s a choice that you make to continue deepening your relationship with your family. And, yeah, we all really look out for each other. My sisters are my best friends.” As for the traits she’s inherited: “From my dad, a wise-ass, mischievous charm. And from my mom, deep courage. I feel very grateful to have both of them.”
Back in LA later this month, Scout Willis will be letting her whole family hear her second album. For now, though, another single came out earlier this month. It’s called Take Me, and she’s described it “as the most sexually embodied song I’ve ever written”.
“Yeah!” she hoots when I mention that. She explains that it’s a reaction to the songs on her first album, which were written during a break-up. Cue “a lot of yearning and longing and pain and confusion”. But now, for the happily single Willis, “this song is unambiguously about desire in the first person. About all the things that I wanted that I hadn’t had for a long time. Things that excited me.”
And what’s the first line?
“Take me for a ride,” answers a grinning Willis, her mother and father’s daughter for sure.
Scout Willis’s single, Take Me, is out now. Her second album is out next year
