Mr. Cool

Bruce Willis looks polished to a Beverly Hills shine.

He’s trimmer and less bulky in person than you might expect; there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of excess fat anywhere on his 52-year-old frame. He’s wearing an expensive-looking gray suit and a crisp white shirt.

He has that air of effortless authority that can only be cultivated through years of being treated like the most important person in the room. When, for instance, he forgets the name of a stunt person he worked with on the third “Die Hard” film, he asks a publicist to make a few phone calls to Los Angeles to find out.

In three words, he is calm, cool and collected.

“Fifty percent of the time I’m right, but 50 percent of the time I’m just as wrong,” he says in response to a question about his knack for choosing projects like “Die Hard” (1988) and “The Sixth Sense” (1999) – critical and commercial successes that also redefined their respective genres.

“I’ve made just as many mistakes in choosing as I have successes. I really don’t know more than anyone else does.”

On Wednesday, Willis will return as John McClane in “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth installment of the “Die Hard” franchise (and the first in 12 years).

It sounds like one of those ill-fated attempts by a fading star to rekindle his past glory – the kind of movie that could turn an icon into a laughingstock (see Sylvester Stallone’s recent “Rocky Balboa”).

The thing about Willis, however, is that he’s never really faded, despite having appeared in his share of notorious bombs – like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1990) and “Hudson Hawk” (1991) – and despite the fact that he hasn’t had a huge hit in years.

Instead, his brand of simmering American cool – the unflappable tough guy who plays everything very close to the vest – only seems more appealing in our modern era of the pretty-boy, eager-to-please action hero (paging Orlando Bloom and Tobey Maguire).

Willis’ work in dramatic roles has proved even more remarkable, being both understated and unpredictable. Behind his glistening, steely movie-star facade is one of the most accomplished and original actors working in movies today.

“The day after Fox agreed to pay me $5 million to do that film, every male actor’s salary in Hollywood rotated up to that number,” Willis says of his record-breaking salary for the original “Die Hard.”

“I didn’t get any cards. No thank-yous. No Christmas presents,” he adds. “I remember there were studio heads who predicted that it would be the end of film, to pay an unproven TV actor that much money for a film. They were predicting doom.”

At the time, those concerns certainly seemed legitimate. Willis was known mostly for his role as David Addison opposite Cybill Shepherd on the ABC series “Moonlighting.” He was also known as the former bartender from New Jersey who partied all hours of the day and night.

The idea that this likable but fundamentally lightweight TV actor could anchor a major summer movie seemed hard to fathom.

Willis proved the naysayers wrong – and then some. Funny, gripping, and breathlessly paced, “Die Hard” – about a cop who must single-handedly rescue a group of hostages from a skyscraper – earned almost universally favorable reviews and ended up grossing $83 million.

Willis brought to the movie the same smirky charm he displayed on “Moonlighting.” But he also showed a forcefulness we hadn’t seen from him before – a kind of blue-collar tenacity that made the McClane character tremendously appealing.

It was in a number of supporting parts that followed – including “Nobody’s Fool” and “Pulp Fiction” (both in 1994) – that Willis began to develop his trademark style.

By the time he paired with M. Night Shyamalan for the now-classic “The Sixth Sense” (1999), Willis was a major movie star. But that film – in which he played a mysterious psychiatrist who befriends a young boy who has supernatural visions – revealed that Willis had also developed the sort of complex interior life that we associate with our very greatest actors.

Haunted without being mopey and (just as in real life) commanding without being especially loud, Willis is heartbreaking in “The Sixth Sense,” finally reducing the audience to tears. It remains one of the biggest Oscar oversights in the past decade that he was not nominated for a statue alongside co-stars Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette.

“Live Free or Die Hard” arrives in theaters after a string of disappointments for Willis. Some, like “Hostage” (2005) or this year’s “Perfect Stranger,” were ill-conceived from the start; others – “Hart’s War” (2002) and “16 Blocks” (2006) – were modest genre pieces that never quite found the audiences they deserved.

But Willis insists that he’s not reviving the McClane character out of desperation; in fact, he says it took the studio years to persuade him to do it.

“There was a lot of trepidation when I was considering it,” he says. “The potential to fail was really high. We had to have a great script, and we needed to get a great director.”

Will the movie appeal to today’s bigger-louder-noisier action fans – mostly teenage boys who were still in diapers when the last “Die Hard” movie opened in 1995?

If he’s worried, Willis certainly isn’t about to let you see him sweat. Quite the contrary, he seems so relaxed and authoritative talking about “Live Free or Die Hard” that the actual success or failure of the film almost seems beside the point. You get the sense that, one way or the other, Mr. Cool will weather any storm.

“When I was learning how to act, doing ‘Moonlighting’ and the films I was doing then, I felt that I wasn’t really going to get the best roles until I was in my 40s and 50s,” Willis says, barely raising his voice above the rumble of the thunder outside.

“My prediction was accurate. I just know so much more about storytelling now. And I understand that my job has never been to be a movie star. My job is to be entertaining as an actor.”