South Jersey Native, Bruce Willis has a new movie out called Surrogates. The film is about people  living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates.  Willis grew up in Penns Grove, Salem County, NJ. He’s the subject of this week’s South Jersey Spotlight.

Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955), better known as Bruce Willis, born in West Germany, and raised in South Jersey.  His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles. He is well known for the role of John McClane in the Die Hard series, which were critical and financial successes. He has also appeared in over sixty films, including Pulp Fiction, Sin City, 12 Monkeys, Armageddon, and The Sixth Sense.

Willis was born in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, the son of a Kassel-born German, Marlene, who worked in a bank, and David Willis, an American soldier. Willis was the eldest of four children: he has a sister Florence and a brother David. His brother Robert died of pancreatic cancer in 2001, aged 42.

After being discharged from the military in 1957, Willis’ father took his family back to Penns Grove, New Jersey, where he worked as a welder and factory worker. His parents separated in 1972, while Willis was in his teens.

Willis attended Penns Grove High School in his hometown, where he encountered issues with a stutter. He used to be hatefully nicknamed Buck-Buck by his schoolmates.

Finding it easy to express himself on stage and losing his stutter in the process, Willis began performing on stage and his high school activities were marked by such things as the drama club and student council president.

After high school, Willis took a job as a security guard at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant and also transported work crews at the DuPont Chambers Works factory in Deepwater, New Jersey. He quit after a colleague was killed on the job, and became a regular at several bars. Willis learned to play the harmonica.

After a stint as a private investigator (a role he would play in the television series Moonlighting as well as in the 1991 film, The Last Boy Scout), Willis returned to acting. He enrolled in the drama program at Montclair State University, where he was cast in the class production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Willis left school in his junior year and moved to New York City.

Willis returned to the bar scene, only this time for a part-time job at the West Bank Cafe in New York City’s Manhattan Plaza. After multiple auditions, Willis made his theater debut in the off-Broadway production of Heaven and Earth. He gained more experience and exposure in Fool for Love, and in a Levi’s commercial.

In addition to Surrogates, he has a few more projects in the works. Willis’ future projects include several films that will debut between 2009 and 2010. Willis was slated to play U.S. Army general William R. Peers in director Oliver Stone’s Pinkville, a drama about the investigation of the 1968 My Lai Massacre. However, due to the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, the film was cancelled and Willis took up the film, Surrogates, which is based on the comic book of the same name.

Willis will star alongside Tracy Morgan in a comedy with a working title of A Couple of Dicks, directed by Kevin Smith. The film is about two police detectives investigating the theft of a baseball card.[30] Release is set for January 2010.

Willis is set to star alongside former Planet Hollywood co-owners and 80’s action stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2010 film The Expendables. The film, also written and directed by Stallone, will feature the three aging action stars on screen together for the first time. Willis will play Mr. Church, a mysterious man who hires The Expendables.