In Bill Murray’s new movie, “The Friend,” currently in theaters and based on the beautifully bittersweet novel by Sigrid Nunez, he plays Walter, a writer and professor who is best friends with Iris, played by Naomi Watts. Through an upsetting course of events, Iris, who lives in a modest apartment in Manhattan, winds up having to take in Walter’s Great Dane. Not exactly ideal for her or the dog, and not exactly thoughtful of Walter.
Witty and charismatic but also self-centered and responsible for real damage, Walter shares much in common with many of Murray’s late-career roles. I often think of the dramatic parts that he has specialized in since the late ’90s (consider the melancholy men of a certain age in “Rushmore,” “Lost in Translation,” “On the Rocks,” “St. Vincent” and so on) as being akin to alternate-world versions of the comedy characters that made him a star. Because Peter Venkman in “Ghostbusters” or Phil Connors in “Groundhog Day,” to pick just two of his most memorable comedic creations, could also be selfish and mean but, in the end, got away with it. Not so with Walter and his ilk. It’s as if Murray’s latter-day characters are suffering the karmic payback owed to his earlier ones.
A similar balancing act — between charm and callousness, buoyancy and bad moods — has surfaced in Murray’s offscreen life too. Yes, he is a globe-trotting avatar of joyful surprise, known for his party crashing and playful high jinks, but directors and co-stars like Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss and Harold Ramis have said Murray was, to put it very mildly, not easy to work with. And in 2022, a female staff member working on the film “Being Mortal” claimed that Murray, who is 74, behaved inappropriately with her on set. She said that he straddled her and kissed her through masks, which they were wearing as part of Covid-19 protocols. The production was shut down, and eventually they reached a settlement.
Given all this, Murray, enigmatic and mercurial, is a hard one to figure out. But on a rainy day in late March, at a hotel in downtown Manhattan, I had a chance to try.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
You know, at The Times earlier today, your co-star in “The Friend,” the dog, was having his photo taken. He is a striking dog: 150 pounds, a Great Dane. His name is Bing. Bing! He lives in Iowa, and after a nationwide search he was chosen as the dog of the moment. He wasn’t wearing a tight sweater or anything. He was just the most capable dog.
You have only one or two scenes with Bing, but it looked to me as if you got a kick out of the dog. It reminded me of “Larger Than Life,” the movie in which you co-star with an elephant. And I rewatched “What About Bob?” and there’s a family dinner scene where it looks as if you’re just enjoying making the kids in it laugh. Not to conflate dogs and children, but what’s fun about working with “nonprofessional” actors? Let’s see. The elephant and the dog are unusual in that they’re consistent. They have their nature, and that is it. The elephant I had an extraordinary time with. I always say it’s the only co-star I ever cried over when I left. I gave her a bath with a hose, and I cried like a baby because she was the most beautiful co-star I ever had, the smartest co-star I ever had and the only one I miss. Unbelievably intelligent. You go, “Uh oh, the one on four legs is ahead of me.” With Bing, the same thing. When I saw the first cut, I said: Are you kidding? Is this dog Stanislavsky?
When you’re in a scene with a human, are you also looking for consistency? No. The way I was educated as an actor was, you can’t possibly recreate that moment that just happened a minute ago. Why try? I want something brand-new. This is the one that counts, because this is the one we’re in. I want you to show up. That’s the consistency I want. My brother Brian described it well: Actors don’t really compete. That has an ugly feel to it, competing. But how about if I go here, can you match that and go here? You keep elevating the scene, and you keep adding more dynamics — more color, different energy. You get to a level where you’re seeing a great exchange between a couple of actors.
When did you realize you were good at improvising and being in the moment? I’m not the best improviser. There were people even back in Second City that were far better than I was. I could do something. And — I don’t know what your question is anymore. I got lost in the tunnel.
When did you realize you were good at improv? Oh! I did have a moment at Second City where I spoke a line, or I played part of a scene, and at that moment I said: That was good. That was as good as people do. I could do this for a living.
Do you remember what the moment was? Nope. But I remember the moment. That’s the key. That’s when I went, OK, I can do this. I can go for it now.
My understanding is that on Friday you were in Japan for a baseball game? I wasn’t playing, but yeah, I was there.
Now we’re here in New York, and tomorrow you’re going to Austin to play with your band. And yesterday I was in Raleigh for an N.C.A.A. basketball game.
Learning that you were gallivanting around fits in with this idea of you as a guy who’s following his bliss wherever that leads. What are the ways in which being present and open in life are different from or similar to being present and open as a performer? Is it all the same game? It’s absolutely the same game. For me, the bliss of it is that my job is a strong reminder of that being present thing. I can bamboozle my way through a day, but when I go to work, I know that there’s going to be a document that says, this is where this character was. There’s going to be proof of how much I showed up. So it’s lucky that I have that job, because I don’t know how often I’d be doing it. You mentioned this gallivanting thing, and I’m very much aware of the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain,” where she says, You’ve chartered a Learjet to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun. She’s describing a pompous ass, you know? And I think, how do you say, “Well, I’m going to go to Tokyo and then to Raleigh and then to New York and then to Texas” and not be just a tumbleweed that has no grounding?
So, how do you? As long as I know that when I go here, I will be forced to make an effort to show up, to be what people tend now to call present. I could feel like a twit doing all those things, but if I work hard, I don’t feel that way.
You lost your dad at 17. Do you think your dad’s passing put you on a particular path? I do. I think I had two events in my life. That was one, and the other one, was when I was about 4, my younger sister contracted polio. I wasn’t aware of what was happening, but all of a sudden you become not exactly an afterthought, but you’re not the primary worry anymore. I had a great birthday when I was 5. I got a Davy Crockett bicycle with a rifle sheath and a rifle that came with it loaded on the frame of the bike. It had saddle bags. I got a coonskin cap, I got a Cubs jacket and a Cubs hat, a baseball and a bat. And I never had another birthday until I was 13. That was it. Then when I was 17, my father died. There went the family income. Whatever life we were with nine kids by that point, was going to be even more crimped. So I had to figure out how to get by in life.
There are all these urban legends that I’m sure you’re familiar with: You playing kickball with people on Roosevelt Island, or commandeering a golf cart in Scandinavia, or the one where people said you would come up behind them on the street, put your hands over their eyes, and then when they turned around, you’d tell them, “No one will ever believe you.” I realized in preparing for this interview that those stories don’t pop up anymore. Did you stop doing that stuff? Did the world change and it felt less fun to do? That sort of legend thing is now preceding me. I’m probably a little tentative about the same nature of engagement, but I don’t feel like I’m afraid to go outdoors. There I was out in Tokyo the other night, and I thought, If this were America, I’d be really conscious about some idiot making this a YouTube thing. But I just thought, this is fun. I’m having fun. It was good for me.
There’s an anecdote about Samuel Beckett in both the film of “The Friend” and the book: He’s out walking with a friend, and it’s a beautiful day, and the friend says to Beckett, “Isn’t a day like this enough to make you glad to be alive?” And Beckett says, “I won’t go as far as that.” That line seems to capture something about you, the awareness of the beautiful aspects of life and then also a melancholy — a lot of your best dramatic work touches on real melancholy. Do you relate to a line like that? I came from Second City, and we didn’t consider ourselves comedians, although our shows were funny. We considered ourselves actors, and if you’re a good comedian, you’re a good actor, because it’s the same process. You have to be able to read a straight line to get a laugh. There aren’t as many funny movies written as there once were. Comedy used to be king. Comedies came out in the summer, and if a movie was funny, it would run the whole summer. Then it became a Marvel summer. It became, Have you seen “Mr. Fantastico” or whatever the hell? The movie industry got away from making those funny movies, and it’s sort of inevitable if you stay alive and you keep working that you have to do something different. But these movies that have melancholy in them, there’s definitely funny things in them too. Like, there’s a scene in “Lost in Translation” where there’s this melancholy guy, he’s in this bar on the top of the tallest hotel in Tokyo, and he is drinking to get drunk. He meets this young girl, and he’s dressed in a tuxedo, and he’s just come from doing this horrendous commercial shoot. He plays this whole scene, and then he turns his back and you realize his jacket is all pinned together in the back so it fits perfectly in the front for the TV camera. But he’s so oblivious and fleeing from the horrible reality of his life, he doesn’t even bother to take the damn pins out of the back. He’s forgotten they’re there. The unknowing of what’s funny about your own life is amusing when you do see it. When you see what a fool you make of yourself or how blind you are, that stuff’s funny. I appreciate it in my own life, and it’s great to show it on the screen.
Your part in “The Friend” reminds me of some other relatively recent parts from your career: a charismatic, charming guy who’s also sort of a selfish ding-dong. And I just saw that you had done an interview at Sundance, and you referred to taking on roles like the one in “On the Rocks” as a kind of “penance.” Penance could mean making amends. It could mean punishment. What would it mean to say that taking on a role is a form of penance? And did that apply to Walter in “The Friend”? Those definitions are accurate. The one I would kind of lean toward myself is that you have to suffer to play it. To play a complete jerk or what did you call it?
A selfish ding-dong. I’d never heard those words together. I liked it. So to play a selfish ding-dong, for me the penance is having to be the part of that person. You really have to make people uncomfortable, and even though it’s only acting and it’s only for a minute, it’s real. You make people feel it. And to do that, you can’t cheat. You can’t be nice. You can’t be like a Method idiot and be mean all the time; I work with those fools. But you have to be a selfish ding-dong in the scene, and you have to be unrelenting. When you bear down on someone, if you’re doing it well enough, you hurt someone. They feel the hurt because you’re doing it to enable them to express the hurt for the camera. It’s rough stuff.
Is it cathartic for you? You can feel that, too. When you’ve performed as a horrible creep, you know, Hey, I have been that horrible creep and not seen it and not been aware of it. And if you’re doing it in the scene, doing it well, you’re seeing it.
There is a parallel between Walter and you in that Walter has been accused of inappropriate misconduct, and a couple of years ago on “Being Mortal,” there was what was described as inappropriate misconduct. Surely those parallels occurred to you. Did you think about them during the film? I don’t go too many days or weeks without thinking of what happened in “Being Mortal.”
Can you say what happened? Yeah, I can say what happened. I think I’m allowed to. I tried to make peace. I thought I was trying to make peace. I ended up being, to my mind, barbecued. But someone that I worked with, that I had had lunch with on various days of the week — it was Covid, we were all wearing masks, and we were all stranded in this one room listening to this crazy scene. I dunno what prompted me to do it. It’s something that I had done to someone else before, and I thought it was funny, and every time it happened, it was funny. I was wearing a mask, and I gave her a kiss, and she was wearing a mask. It wasn’t like I touched her, but it was just, I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.
You said you think about this often? It still bothers me because that movie was stopped by the human rights or “H & R” of the Disney corporation, which is probably a little bit more strident than some other countries’. It turned out there were pre-existing conditions and all this kind of stuff. I’m like, what? How was anyone supposed to know anything like that? There was no conversation, there was nothing. There was no peacemaking, nothing. It went to this lunatic arbitration, which, if anyone ever suggests you go to arbitration: Don’t do it. Never ever do it. Because you think it’s justice, and it isn’t.
Do you feel as if you learned something from that experience? I think so. You can teach an old dog new tricks. But it was a great disappointment, because I thought I knew someone, and I did not. I certainly thought it was light. I thought it was funny. To me it’s still funny, the idea that you could give someone a kiss with a mask on. It’s still stupid. It’s all it was. And we’re talking about a movie, “Being Mortal,” which is a wonderful book.
By Atul Gawande, about death and dying. The subject matter is gruesome. It’s about a man whose father is dying before his very eyes. When you’re dealing with this painful material all day long, part of what my job has always been is to keep the mood light. The job is not easy, and when you’re doing a story about pain and misery, everyone can get pained and miserable, and you don’t want that. You want to say: Hey, we’re still who we are. We’re not dying like this man is dying in the movie. We’re living a life, and we have a great opportunity here to live it. Let’s go. The day before this, we had mariachis at lunch, and I got up and sang “La Bamba” with the band. We’re trying to make this a little bit more bearable. Life is and should be hard, it should be challenging. It’s hard enough without getting miserable.
There’s something I don’t understand about you. You’re not alone there. I don’t understand something about me.
You describe wanting to bring lightness, but there are a handful of rough stories about you on set. Winging a glass ashtray at Richard Dreyfuss’s head — You can tell that story as much as you like, but it’s never going to be true. I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling. We were in a townhouse on the set of “What About Bob?” and I did not fire it at anyone. I threw it up in a far corner of the townhouse, assuming it might break upon contact with the ceiling and the walls, but I didn’t throw it at anyone. If I’d thrown it at Dreyfuss, I’d have hit him.
In Geena Davis’s memoir, she said you dressed her down. Outrageous.
I don’t need to go through the list, but — When someone has an episode like mine on “Being Mortal,” the world goes searching for more proof that this person is a monster. An absolute monster. Well, I’ve had interactions with hundreds of thousands of people over 40, 50 years. Now, you can come up with half a dozen. If you really worked, you’d probably come up with a couple dozen.
You’re saying they’re not representative. This is my life. I am engaged all the time. I’m not complaining about it because I hate people that complain about it, but I don’t walk down the street the way that you can walk down the street. I walk down the street, and people go, “Hey you.” I miss walking down the street like you walk down the street. I miss it, but it’s never coming back. So I deal. Most people, I have an OK experience with. Some people you have a spectacular experience with. But my percentages are no different than yours. If you meet a hundred people, I meet a thousand people. Out of your 100, 75 of them are kind of forgettable, right? Maybe 80. Then there’s a handful that are wonderful, and then there’s a handful that are unpleasant and miserable. I have the same numbers. I just have lots more.
The inability to walk down the street anonymously, how did you figure out how to manage that? It’s a continuous process. It is not like, Oh, I figured that one out, because I’m not the same person now that I was 20 minutes ago. I’m not. You can have a different point of view about it. You can hide from people. I’ve walked down the street with a hat down over my head, glasses on my eyes. I loved Covid.
Because you could disappear? Because I could walk down the street with a mask on my face. It was fantastic. But I’ve been all kinds of ways about it, and it’s a continuing development. I used to spend so much energy. People would say, “Can I take your picture?” And I would be the kind of ass that would say, “It’s ‘May I take your picture?’” Do you know how many times I said that to no avail? Absolutely no avail. But I wasted a whole lot of time that way, doing stuff to make it acceptable on my stupid terms, trying to make life more like I like it. What a screw head. So now what I do for a living is, I take cellphone photographs. I’m not an actor. I am a donkey that is photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera. That’s what I do all day long. I don’t regret it. I don’t resent it. This is what I do, and it’s so simple, and I’ve realized how much energy I was wasting resisting it. It was just crazy, and when it finally hit me, I went: Oh, my God, what a jerk. How could you have been a jerk for that long? [Murray tears up.]
Have you found a way to get fulfillment out of this new job that you have? Also, you got teary-eyed. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve. It’s not so much fulfilling. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Most people recognize when they see how skillful I am with this reverse, they say: “Oh, my God. How did you do that?” Well, because I’ve done it thousands of times, that’s how I got good at it. It’s like a guy who fixes pipes, got good at it. [Heavy sigh.] This thing is six hours long.
We’re almost done. What you said about being a different person than you were prior — Are we getting anything done here?
I’m having a good time. You can be a different person in the present than you were before. Do you like that feeling, or is it destabilizing? If you see what you’re up to, you should like it whether you’re being horrible or being wonderful. If you see it, that’s great. Score one. You get a star for that.
Because the awareness is what’s important? Yeah. The awareness of being what you are. That has value. There’s no value to just rolling through. They just put you in a grave at the end. You didn’t do anything.
I want to finish with a little section from the novel “The Friend.” Somehow I knew he was going to read aloud at some point during this thing.
Do I give that vibe? Well, you didn’t have any of your own poetry, which is a big plus, but go ahead.
This is right near the end of the novel: “What we miss — what we lose and what we mourn — isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.” So my question for you is, what haven’t you gotten that you wanted, and what did you get that you wanted? I don’t know which to say first.
Say the sadder one first, and then let’s end on an up note. The sadder one is — I don’t want to sound too damn special here, but I haven’t gotten where I’m active all the time.
Meaning aware? Yeah. I haven’t gotten so that I’m much more of a person, a being than I am now. I haven’t gotten there. But what I have gotten was the opportunity, the knowledge, that there’s a way to do this, if only you had the guts or the inner resources to do it. If you were just tougher on yourself, if you were just more demanding, not so lazy, not so unconscious. But you can rally. The rallies are extraordinary. The rallies are great, and they give you hope, and it’s the hope for a rally that keeps me going. I really hope for a rally, all the time.
Feel one coming on? This is a rally.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Video by Tre Cassetta and Leslye Davis.
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond. More about David Marchese
The post Bill Murray Says He’s Not the Man He Used to Be appeared first on New York Times.
