Bill Murray’s eternal joke is no longer funny: the actor ruins his career between complaints and allegations of harassment

In the end, Bill Murray’s eternal joke (Wilmette, Illinois, 72 years old) is no longer funny. The American comedian, one of the most famous thanks to titles like Ghostbusters, Stuck in Time and his collaborations with Wes Anderson, suffered last week a wave of complaints from former filming partners, who coincided with the publication of his agreement with an assistant whom he harassed on the set of his latest film, Being Mortal, whose production was stopped while the complaint was studied.

The break came on April 15, when a worker (anonymity is maintained) denounced Murray’s touching that same day before the film’s producer, Searchlight Pictures, a current subsidiary of Disney. After investigating the facts the following week, the company sent a letter to all team members, which closed as follows: “After reviewing the circumstances, it has been decided that production cannot continue at this time.” The Web puck revealed on Monday the 10th that Murray had paid $100,000 to a production assistant from the Being Mortal, “much younger” than him, in an out-of-court settlement after trying to kiss her and straddle her. The outlet cites a source from the shoot who described her partner as “horrified” because the actor’s actions “were completely sexual.”

In April, a witness to the shooting narrated in Page Six: “He put an arm around a woman, touched her hair, pulled her ponytail, but always in a comical way. It’s a fine line and everyone loves Bill, but even though his conduct was not illegal, some women felt uncomfortable and he crossed the line.” In May, in an interview on NBC, Murray defended himself: “There was a difference of opinion with a woman I was working with. I did something that I considered funny and it was not understood that way […]. The world is very different from what it was when I was a child. You know, what seemed funny before doesn’t have to be funny now. Things change, so it’s important for me to learn.” True, Murray continues to behave as he did half a century ago, from joke to joke, even in the professional aspect: he has no agent or assistant, and to contact the actor or hire him, he can only be reached through his answering machine. landline.

In Hollywood gossip, many consider this production closed. Disney finds it cheaper to forget the film (it was halfway through shooting), which already had a preload added: it was written, produced, directed and co-starred by the comedian Aziz Ansari, who returned to Hollywood after having been publicly accused in 2018 of sexual misconduct by a woman with whom he had a date. However, on Saturday night, actress Keke Palmer, co-star, insisted that everything was up in the air, that the “script is gold”, although it would take a “giant rewrite” by Ansari to eliminate Murray, and that she would happily return to the set.

The man who makes people laugh in the street

For decades, Murray has turned his life into a constant stream of graces, from surprise appearances at wedding receptions to fast-food restaurants or speeding golf carts down the street. Also for years, he spread on the sets the fame of his unpunctuality, and his irascible and fickle character. Dan Aykroyd himself used to describe it as The Murricane (translatable as “Hurricane Murray”). The same thing happened in his day to day. Until social networks arrived, and what was legend became videos and online stories of anecdotes starring the comedian: he stole potatoes from a bag from a stranger while he waited to cross a traffic light; he would show up at college parties to wash the dishes, deliver pizzas to homes, reach into the pockets of passers-by to give away money, or get arrested for driving a golf cart in Stockholm late at night and sober… And his fans enjoyed it. Murray used to accompany his pranks with a leitmotiv recurring: “No one will believe you.” Of all those wanderings they drew up a record Bill Murray: tips for lifea documentary directed in 2018 by Tommy Avallone with anecdotes starring the actor, or the book How to be Bill Murray (2016), by Gavin Edwards, who explained that his object of study “teaches us to live with actions and not with words”.

But it wasn’t all fun. Last week, Lucy Liu recalled that during the filming of Charlie’s Angels, Murray blurted out, “Why are you here? You don’t know how to act”, which caused the explosion of the actress; In that filming, director McG assured that Murray pressed her forehead against his in an argument, a habitual gesture of the actor against the people with whom he fights. In the memoirs of Geena Davis, Dying of Politenesspublished on Tuesday 11, the actress has dedicated several paragraphs to his bad experience with Murray in With the cops on your heels. During filming, the actor insisted on giving her a back massage. with a machine; in the end, Davis relented, after refusing the offer numerous times, not to stage a scene, which also did not prevent him from continuing to yell at her regularly during the filming in front of 300 people. Later, in the television promotion of the comedy, Davis also had a hard time when Murray wanted to lower the straps of his dress live on the Arsenio Hall show.

Murray began his comedic career at The Second City in Chicago, a theater company famous for its delirious improvisations, the cradle of his sense of humor. After going to do radio in New York with John Belushi, another of his colleagues from the troupe, in 1977 he joined the legendary program Saturday Night Live (SNL). He has returned to this revered space, after leaving it in 1980, on numerous occasions. On Thursday the 13th Rob Schneider, a member of SNL decades later, assured in a radio program that every time Murray returned as a guest to SNLThe tension was palpable. “Literally, she hated us,” Schneider recounted in The Jim Norton & Sam Roberts Show. There is no “logical” explanation for this hatred of the members of the program, which according to Schneider had two main recipients: Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. In that weekly comedy installment of NBC Murray coincided with Seth Green when he was nine years old and the actor from Lost in Translation was over thirty. Green had never discussed her incident with Murray until Thursday. in the online program Good Mythical Morning He recalled how in a common dressing room, while they watched the rest of the performances on a screen, Green sat on the arm of a multi-seater sofa and Murray reproached him for being there, since it was his sofa. Green’s mother tried to mediate, the boy refused to move “because the sofa was too long” and Murray grabbed him by the ankles, turned him over, took him to a garbage can shouting “trash to your bucket” and released him there to the horror of the kid.

Some of these facts were already known, others were added to a long preceding collection of strange incidents. On the set of What about Bob? Richard Dreyfuss proposed to him to change some dialogues and Murray pressed his forehead against his partner’s while shouting: “Everyone hates you.” He then threw a glass ashtray at her and attempted to punch her. The filming ended thanks to the constant presence of a bodyguard on the set to stop Murray. After half a dozen collaborations, the producer of What about Bob?Laura Ziskin decided never to work with him again when he threw her into a lake during an argument and broke her sunglasses.

At the time, his confrontation with Chevy Chase when he returned to SNL, although it is true that Chase’s career sank at its zenith because of his megalomania. More painful was their fight with actor and director Harold Ramis, one of his best friends, during the production of Caught in time because Murray wanted to give an existential speech to the script and its author preferred to prioritize comedy. In addition, the comedian was in the process of divorce and some days he did not appear on the set; in others, he was just going to make a fuss. “Bill was irrational and unapproachable at times. He was constantly late and I talked to him like my children: ‘You don’t have to throw tantrums to get what you want, just say what you want,’ Ramis recalled in 2004 in The New Yorker. Even then, as now, Murray had no assistant. From production, desperate, they recommended hiring an assistant, and the actor signed a deaf assistant, who only knew sign language, communication system that neither he nor anyone else on set knew about. The friendship broke down, and Murray never wanted to speak to his fellow ghost hunter again, according to Ramis’s daughter. Until one day in 2014, when Ramis was already very ill with cancer and speechless, weeks from dying, Murray appeared at his house to reconcile.

What remains for Murray as a professional foothold? The loyalty of his friends. In addition to various titles indies and appearances in reboot (re-launches of a fiction series keeping only some elements) by Ghostbusters, In recent years, the comedian’s works have come from the hand of three directors very close to him: Sophie Coppola, Jim Jarmusch and WesAnderson. Especially in the filmography of the latter: from his second feature film, Rushmore Academy (1998), the actor has always appeared in Anderson’s films until his last Spanish filming, Asteroid City. And it was not due to disagreements: in the script there was a character for the comedian, and He came to stay in the parador of the Madrid city of Chinchón. However, Murray tested positive for covid and had to leave the production. Further, in the Marvel universe there is a small appearance announced by Murray —without specifying— in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which will hit theaters in February 2023, and which is still in post-production. There are no more plans in the interpretive future of an actor who seems to have been run over by the excesses of the past.