The Clint Eastwood movie Bill Murray turned down: “It’s one of the few regrets I have”
Bill Murray doesn’t live a life of regrets. He’s seized the opportunities as they arose, for better or worse, and now in his mid-70s, he’s pretty content with his decisions. Still, in a recent interview, he revealed that there was one part that came his way that he wishes he hadn’t passed on.
From his earliest days on Saturday Night Live, Murray has been associated almost exclusively with comedy. Even in his later years when he appeared in largely dramatic films like Lost in Translation, Broken Flowers, and the period drama Hyde Park on Hudson, he brought his trademark deadpan humour to the table, which makes it surprising that at one point, he wanted to work with Clint Eastwood.
In an interview on The Howard Stern Show recently, Murray revealed that after going down a rabbit hole of Eastwood movies in the 1970s or ‘80s, he decided to call the director out of the blue, angling to play a sidekick in some future project and having a spectacular death scene. Murray had just finished the military comedy Stripes and was surprised when Eastwood asked him if he would be interested in doing another service comedy.
“He had this great idea for an enormous Navy thing,” Murray explained. “And when he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy,’ like jeez, ‘Would I become like Abbott and Costello?’ I had to do like military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess maybe I shouldn’t.’”
It would have been an unlikely niche to be pigeon-holed into. Abbott and Costello might have ended up doing propaganda for the war effort in the 1940s, but it was far less likely in a post-Vietnam War era that Murray would befall the same trap.
Although he didn’t namecheck the film, the project Eastwood likely had in mind was 1986’s Heartbreak Ridge, which broke from his usual stone-faced western milieu with its darkly comedic take on the Korean War.
“It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it,” Murray said, “Because it was a big-scale thing, and I would have gotten a great – I don’t know if I’d have gotten a great death scene, it was more of a comedy that one – but it was great.”
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