Difficult customer or dream collaborator: the battle between the two sides of Bill Murray
Comedians – and, by extension, comic actors – tend to be a complicated bunch, and few have lived up to that sentiment for longer than Bill Murray, an icon with two distinct sides that have been in constant opposition for decades.
On the one hand, there’s the beloved star of Saturday Night Live, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Scrooged, and many more, who’s been making audiences laugh since the 1970s and evolved into an almost mythical cult figure thanks to his habit of randomly popping up in the most unexpected of places to partake in an assortment of miscellaneous activities.
He’s become a trusted collaborator of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Jim Jarmusch, to name but three. All of them have and will happily go out of their way to recruit Murray for their latest project, knowing there’s a supremely high probability he’ll agree out of nothing more than respect or admiration.
However, there’s the other side of Murray, which hints towards a mean streak a mile wide that’s left countless colleagues and contemporaries bristling with anger. Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfuss, Lucy Liu, McG, and Anjelica Huston are some of the names to have encountered that secondary personality, one who doesn’t mind being rude, verbally, or even physically abusive when he’s not enjoying himself.
Harold Ramis lived somewhere in the middle, with the two becoming firm friends and regular creative partners until Groundhog Day caused a schism between them that wouldn’t heal for decades. Everybody knows Bill Murray, but the people who know the real Bill Murray are in much shorter supply.
Unless it’s somebody who’s either worked with him before or knows how to bring out the best in him, no actor or filmmaker knows exactly which Murray they’re going to get until he turns up for work. Reflecting on the negativity surrounding him, the Academy Award nominee sounded like he was trying to deflect the blame away from himself.
“I remember a friend said to me a while back, ‘You have a reputation’. And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you have a reputation of being difficult to work with’,” he told The Guardian. “But I only got that reputation from people I didn’t like working with or people who didn’t know how to work or what work is. Jim, Wes, and Sofia, they know what it is to work, and they understand how you’re supposed to treat people.”
As Timothy Olyphant’s lawman Raylan Givens said in the TV series Justified, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” The language might be a little coarse, but the point is inarguably true, and it could reasonably be applied to Murray’s conduct when there are so many people to have spoken of their experiences with him in a less than positive fashion.
There are multiple names on either side of the camera spanning more than 40 years who’ve effectively branded Murray as an asshole, and it hints towards the way he’s conducted himself that he’s adamant the only reason he’s earned the ‘difficult’ tag is that he didn’t enjoy the company of the people he was working with.
Of course, everybody who’s ever had a job has worked with at least one person they can’t stand for whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they’re still working towards the same goal, regardless of what it may be. It’s a cliche that it costs nothing to be nice or even civil, but Murray tends to ruffle feathers when he’s miserable.
He’s also proven his worth multiple times over when he’s invested, interested, and engaged, though, but it stands to reason that the battle between those disparate sides isn’t going to end when he’s been set in his ways for so long.
