The actor Bill Murray never wants to work with again: “Over my dead, lifeless body”
Ask around Hollywood and you will find a particularly polarised opinion of Bill Murray. Undoubtedly considered one of the best comedic actors of his generation, managing to deliver lines with a deadpan panache that very few have been able to master as delicately, but he is also routinely cited as a very difficult man to work with. Being famed for his free spirit and carefree attitude may well gather you millions of online fans, but actually engaging with such a person on a daily basis must be tough when you’re trying to achieve a multi-million dollar project.
For this reason, over the years, more than a few actors and directors have come out to decry the public image of Murray. Everyone’s favourite drunk uncle is, by some accounts, an incredibly rude and intolerable man. This might well be why one of his co-stars seemingly refused to pull punches during an on-screen altercation and left the actor with a bloodied lip.
Scrooged might well be on your somewhat ironic Christmas watch list, but the movie doesn’t quite land with the same zeal as a lot of Murray’s filmography. However, putting Murray at the centre of A Christmas Carol set in the 1980s with the lead as a high-powered TV executive does have its admirers, though Murray himself wasn’t one of them for a long time.
Speaking with Ian Spelling in 1989, Murray said of the picture: “We tore up the script so badly that we had parts all over the lawn. There was a lot I didn’t like.” It would take some years before the movie was punched up enough for Murray to proceed with filming. What he didn’t know was that the script would entail a few more punches, too.
As Murray’s Frank Cross meets the ghosts of Christmas, he comes face to face with ‘The Ghost of Christmas Present’ played by Carol Kane, who then delivers pinches, punches and general punishment to Cross throughout the movie. Having to wear a physically demanding suit seemed to strain the relationship between Kane and Murray, with the former apparently prone to inopportune bouts of crying during filming.
However, it seemed that Kane let her emotions get the better of her, as she seemingly stopped pulling her punches at one point, as Murray explains: “There’s a piece of skin that connects your lip with your gums, and it was really pulled away. She really hurt me, but it was my idea to be physical, and it was her idea just to hit me as opposed to pulling the punches.”
It seemingly irked Murray as he quickly dismissed the idea of working with Kane again, replying “over my dead, lifeless body” with a smile to Spelling when asked if they had a chance at future projects together.
It should be noted that Murray’s sense of humour is hard to decipher. Part of his charm as that the line between fact and fiction seems to be effortlessly blurred by every word he speaks, but the actors never did work together again, so while it’s difficult to know if the misplaced punch did put him off for life, in practice that’s certainly how things played out.
