Being Bruce Willis: Joseph Gordon-Levitt impersonates the action star in ‘Looper’

TORONTO – Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t really a dead ringer for Bruce Willis, even after three hours in a makeup chair getting prosthetic gunk painted on his face by a special effects wizard.

Tweaks to his eyebrows, ears, nose and lips make him look like a different person in the new time-travel flick “Looper, but he’s not necessarily a spitting image of the “Die Hard” star.

So to convincingly play a younger version of the 57-year-old actor, Gordon-Levitt had to learn everything there was to know about Willis and how he carries himself.

“As far as transforming myself it’s kind of the best acting that I’ve done,” the 31-year-old said during a recent interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie premiered and opened the fest.

“The makeup certainly helps … to make my face look a bit more like Bruce — but we knew that my face was never really going to look totally like Bruce Willis’s. And even if it did, that wouldn’t complete the illusion.

“What needed to happen was I needed to create a character that audiences would identify as (Willis’s) character.”

“Looper,” opening Friday, is set in 2044, a bleak-looking future in which the middle class has been wiped out, leaving a stark divide been the rich and the poor. Gordon-Levitt works as a looper, a hitman tasked with a simple but extremely important job. By the 2070s, time travel has been invented and co-opted by crime syndicates. When they want someone dead, a victim is bound and forced into a time travel chamber, which sends them back to a secluded spot in 2044 where a looper is ready to kill them.

Some moviegoers might be deterred by the twisty sci-fi story, which is why writer and director Rian Johnson doesn’t get too deep into the nitty gritty of time travel and exactly how it works.

So filmgoers who felt a bit confused by the layers of Gordon-Levitt’s “Inception” shouldn’t have the same problem with “Looper.”

“I didn’t want this movie to be algebra homework, I didn’t want this movie to be something you could only get into if you came to it with a piece of graph paper and a compass,” says Johnson.

“Time travel is such a tantalizing piece of candy for a sci-fi nerd like myself so it took a lot of discipline to rein it back.”

Gordon-Levitt’s character is eventually offered a sizable pay day to kill the future version of himself, which would essentially start the countdown until his death, giving him 30 years left to live. But he chokes when the big moment comes and allows his older self to escape.

It’s a big scene for Gordon-Levitt, since it’s the first time that he really has to convince audiences that he can play a younger version of Willis.

One of the keys to doing that was in tweaking his speech, says Gordon-Levitt, to mimic Willis’s hushed, lumbering way of speaking.

Willis “is unexpectedly soft spoken and I don’t even mean just in his personal life. In his movies he’s such a powerful presence on screen that if you don’t look twice you’ll assume he’s being big and loud — but he’s actually not at all,” says Gordon-Levitt.

“He’s rather soft spoken in a lot of his performances and he doesn’t have to be loud because he has that power kind of innately.”

Johnson didn’t ask Willis to act like Gordon-Levitt or change a thing about how he usually works.

“The fact that he’s ‘Bruce Willis’ was specifically good for this part, when he shows up the audience expects him to have the plan to save the day.”

The film also stars Emily Blunt as a young mother who lives with her son on a farm in the middle of nowhere, hiding from the desperation of the poverty-ridden big city. She reluctantly offers refuge to Gordon-Levitt’s character, who is hiding out from the mob while trying to figure out how to resolve his botched hit job.

London-born Blunt, who played the Queen in “Young Victoria” and recently starred in the rom-com “The Five-Year Engagement,” has typically not paid much attention to action-packed scripts but connected with “Looper”‘s story.

“The darkness that Rian captured was really exciting with just sort of hints of what the future might hold, as opposed to making it look like everyone’s driving around in spaceships,” says Blunt.

“The script is a frighteningly accessible step ahead of where we’re at now and I found that quite disconcerting in a way, because maybe that is where we’re heading. We don’t know how long it might take to get to what this movie embodies, which is a slight post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog world.”