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Bruce Willis has announced that he intends to retire his Die Hard character John McClane in the near future.



The 55-year-old, who recently claimed that a fifth instalment of the action franchise will begin filming in 2011, detailed his planned exit from the series after sharing his fear of being replaced by a younger star.

He told FHM: "In the next few years they could easily find a replacement for me or call the character someone else. But for me, I want to do Die Hard 5, then one final Die Hard movie - Die Hard 6 - before finally hanging that white vest up for good.

"At the moment, I can run and I can fight on screen. But there will come a time when I no longer want to do that. That's when I'll step away from the Die Hard films."

Willis also revealed that he had been behind the iconic character's most well-known line, which came about after an argument with the film's producers.

"Take the first Die Hard - I was the one who came up with the line, 'Yippee ki-yay motherfucker!' The producers were trying to give me their take on how I should say a certain line at that point in the movie, and I disagreed.

"So they said, 'You do it'. So I did. Yippee ki-yay was some goofy thing that cowboys used to say in those movies, so I added the 'motherfucker' bit as I thought it was a nice, contrasting combination of the two images. And it worked. That expression's really stuck around, that's for sure."