It doesn't take a sixth sense to know that Willis is now a very big Hollywood shot. A few months back a Hollywood insider overheard the actor make a phone call to Matthew Perry, who became a bud while filming the surprise hit comedy The Whole Nine Yards last year. "Hey, this is the Big Star," said the typically self-deprecating Willis. "Come on over to eat dinner with me." Still, tempered by time, fatherhood and the struggles of marriage -- he and Demi Moore, 37, announced their separation in 1998 after 10 years of marriage -- Willis seems today a mellower man. On what he calls a "gun moratorium," he took the role of a wealthy image consultant in midlife crisis in The Kid (with yet another pint-size costar),in large part because he did not have to shoot anyone or even swear. And he agreed to a guest stint on Friends simply because he and Perry thought it would be fun. Clearly, he doesn't need the money: Willis is donating his paycheck to several charities (including a rape crisis center and AIDS research). The fun comes with his casting: As the widowed father of a woman too young to have watched the wisecracking P.I. David Addison on Moonlighting ("It was past my bedtime," says Holden), he ends up smooching on a couch with Jennifer Aniston. Says director Michael Lembeck: "I don't think there was anyone -- including the men -- who didn't think he was a hunk."

Says he doesn't believe monogamy works

And so it goes for the New Jersey-bred bartender turned action hero still known to close pals as Bruno: Happy endings come his way, even in the hardest circumstances. Less than two years after Willis and Moore called their 10-year marriage quits, he has shifted from licking his wounds to living with new lessons. "My feelings (about love) are different now that I'm 44, and I'm sure they'll be different when I'm 50," Willis told London's Daily Telegraph last month, explaining that "I don't believe in the general success of long-term fidelity or monogamy." Indeed, though Willis and Moore have yet to divorce or dissolve their estimated $20 million in joint real estate holdings -- including their 18-acre Flying Heart Ranch in Hailey, Idaho, and a 14-room apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side -- their life as a couple is long over. For more than a year since her last project (the yet-to-be-released Passion of Mind), Moore has devoted herself to carting their three girls -- Rumer, 11; Scout, 8; and Tallulah, 6 -- to basketball games and monitoring homework in Hailey, while slipping in quality time with her martial-arts-instructor beau Oliver Whitcomb, 30. Willis, meanwhile, bought a sprawling $1.1 million stone-and-wood home about five miles north of Hailey last September. Though busy with back-to-back projects (he started work on the supernatural Unbreakable in Philadelphia last week), he returns at least once a month to be with his children -- mountain biking along the creek that runs through his property, grabbing a burger in town or just letting the kids practice Spanish with his girlfriend of 13 months, Madrid-based model-turned-marketing-exec Maria Bravo.