How Bill Murray accidentally sent Jack Nicholson into retirement: “It was clinically personal”
Unlike most professions, there’s no retirement age for actors, and many of them continue working until the wheels fall off. Not Jack Nicholson, though, who gracefully stepped away with his head held high.
Not as high as it could have been, right enough, since his cinematic swansong was a massive flop, and if you want to split hairs, he’s never officially announced his retirement, either. Saying that, it’s been a decade and a half, and if he wanted to come back to the silver screen, he would have done it by now.
If Tom Cruise can’t coax him out of his self-imposed exile, then it’s hard to imagine who can. James L Brooks would be another decent shout, since they became frequent and close collaborators, and he’s never really abandoned his dream of enticing Nicholson to step onto a film set for one last dance.
It’s very unlikely to happen, and it’s more than enough to make you wonder if Nicholson would have stuck around for at least a little bit longer had he not been drafted in as a last-minute replacement for Bill Murray. Despite their shared history, Brooks didn’t have his three-time Academy Award-winning pal at the top of the list to play Charles Madison in 2010’s How Do You Know.
Even though they’d previously worked together on Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets, Murray was lined up to star alongside Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and Paul Rudd in the needlessly expensive $120 million rom-com that tanked at the box office and drew a line under Nicholson’s filmography.
“You just asked the question I was afraid to ask,” Nicholson remarked at the time, after Brooks was quizzed on why he wasn’t the first choice. “Bill Murray started rehearsals with us,” the filmmaker explained. “Then personal things ensued. And very late in the game, he was forced to withdraw from our good ship. With Bill, it was clinically personal.”
While he didn’t elaborate, it’s not difficult to put two and two together. Brooks had been working on the concept for several years, with principal photography beginning in March 2009. In May 2008, Murray’s wife of almost ten years, Jennifer Butler, filed for divorce, accusing him of substance addiction, adultery, and domestic violence, as per court filings.
Their separation was finalised the following month, not long before pre-production for How Do You Know started ramping up, which is as good a guess as any for why Murray dropped out. That opened the door for Nicholson, who maintained that he was at a stage “where I just don’t want to make any movie,” which turned out to be his last.
In a strange turn, the shoe almost ended up on the other foot several years later, when Nicholson briefly agreed to come out of retirement to star in the American remake of Toni Erdmann, a role he was only cast in because Murray had lost the script that Kristen Wiig sent to him, and when he finally got around to reading it, he discovered the part had already been filled.
