Bruce Willis, Hasty Pudding’s Man of the Year, accepted his pudding pot in drag yesterday at the 36th annual Hasty Pudding awards at Harvard University.
Willis was forced to re-enact scenes from a “new sequel” to his famous “Die Hard” movies, was frisked by the Harvard University “nurse,” and played the harmonica during the annual ceremony.
“This is a really exciting award — compared with other awards I have yet to win,” Willis said after being roasted. “Every time I stand up here before my peers in a gold bra, I get really excited.”
While being roasted, Willis repeatedly asked if the event was being televised.
“It’s come to this,” Willis said while wearing a bra and wig. “This picture is going around the world.”
“I haven’t seen this many men dressed in women’s clothing since my bachelor party,” he joked after he was kissed by two men in dresses.
Hasty Pudding producers Joshua Bress and Lena Demashkeih asked Willis to act out “sequels” to some of his more famous movies and also asked him to begin exercising to lighten the amount of testosterone on stage.
“His only exercising is kicking, jumping, shooting and jumping while shooting,” Bress said. Bress also joked about his ability to save the world in the movie “Armageddon.”
“Man, how did you do that?” he asked of Willis’ character’s ability to save the world from an asteroid the size of Texas.
Willis was then forced to put purple sweat bands on his head and wrists. He tried to do some step aerobics, but after taking one step, he started breathing heavily.
“That was both amazing and a little disturbing,” Bress said. “But a little girly. There is absolutely no room for girly guys on this stage.”
Willis also acted out a scene from a new sequel to his “Die Hard” movies, entitled “Die Hard 4: Die Harder Than You’ve Ever Died Before.”
Willis re-enacted a scene from one of the “Die Hard” movies where his character ran across broken glass while dodging bullets. Bress and Demashkeih gave Willis a phony bulletproof vest, complete with bullet holes and blood, and told him to run across cellophane instead of broken glass. The cellophane crackled as he moved across the stage while elaborately trying to dodge the imaginary bullets.
After he passed that test, Willis then had to practice riding a scooter, since in “Die Hard 4,” his driver’s license is to be revoked. He then moved across the stage on the scooter and proceeded to hum while knocking over most of the cones placed as boundaries.
Willis was, at another point, asked to act out a scene from “Pulp Fiction” with two dolls from the “Look Who’s Talking” movies. Bress also joked “Look Who’s Talking Now” was one of the best movies of Willis’ career.
“It was a gripping and completely necessary sequel,” Bress said.
Willis changed the female doll and tried to respond to the female dolls by making fun of the tags on their heads.
Later in the show, after being told by a Spanish matador there were ghosts in the room, Willis played a song on the harmonica.
“In the key of A, folks,” he told the Hasty Pudding orchestra. “Well, it needs to be in the key of A,” he scolded the orchestra when it offered him the key of C.
“Key of A it is,” he finally settled.
While playing, he moved toward Damashkeih and asked if he could use the microphone attached to her dress. Earlier in the evening, he asked Damashkeih if her father was present. When she answered her father was in the third row, he moved away from her.
Willis told reporters he loves Boston, adding he thinks the students at Harvard are “very intelligent people.”
“It was big fun hanging out with these kids today,” he said. “Most of these shindigs seem to be about Hollywood promotion.”
Bress opened up the event by calling the Hasty Pudding club “a ragtag group of actors in a school of misfits that will one day rule the world’s largest corporations.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, star of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” was awarded the pot last week. Previous winners include Drew Barrymore, Anthony Hopkins, Meg Ryan, Harrison Ford and Jodie Foster. Hasty Pudding is the oldest undergraduate theater organization in the country.