The Clint Eastwood movie Bill Murray will always regret turning down: “I wished I’d done that, Clint”
The coming together of two Hollywood icons is enough to sell millions of cinema tickets alone. Usually, a picture needs a great premise, an entertaining cast, and some incredible visuals to help sell stubs at the box office. But getting two legends of the film industry together inside the confines of one movie is enough to sell out alone. This kind of match-up nearly happened when western icon Clint Eastwood and comedy legend Bill Murray almost joined forces.
It’s not particularly easy to see how Eastwood, a man famed for little dialogue and a lot of tempered facial expressions, could sit easily next to the charismatic and chatty Murray, but if you squint like the ‘Man With No Name‘, there could have possibly been a fantastic comedic duo. With Eastwood as the straight man and Murray as the foil, there was certainly some potential for gold.
The truth is, the two men almost did work together, as Murray explained to Howard Stern. “A long time ago, I was watching the Clint Eastwood movies of the day, like ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,’ or whatever the hell those movies he was making back then. And I thought, ‘His sidekick gets killed and he avenges [them] but the sidekick gets a great part, a great death scene.’ I was like, ‘I’ve got to call this guy.’”
The chance to work alongside one of the greats was an alluring prospect, especially if it meant he also gained himself a heroic death scene, but sadly, for Murray, things just didn’t pan out. “So I called him out of the blue and he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy?’” Murray explained. For the comedic actor, the chance to go back into that same schtick didn’t prove too alluring.
Murray expounded: “Because I just made Stripes. And he had this great idea for an enormous Navy thing, and when he said, ‘would you ever want to do another service comedy?’ like, geez, ‘Would I become like [comedy duo] Abbott and Costello?’ I had to do military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess maybe I shouldn’t.’”
While Murray didn’t confirm which movie Eastwood was talking about, it seems likely it was his 1986 release Heartbreak Ridge, which Eastwood directed and starred in as a Marine tasked with whipping a slovenly platoon into shape. It’s the kind of vehicle one might expect Murray to have excelled in, but the risk of being typecast seemed too great to the actor.
“It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it, because it was a big-scale thing, and I would have gotten a great, confessed Murray, who rarely wastes much time lamenting the missed opportunities of his career. “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. He had access to World War II boats and he could have like made a flotilla and stuff, and there was some cool stuff in it.”
It would seem that the chance to work with Eastwood still plagues his thoughts, as he also revealed that, on the occasion he bumps into the star, he still apologises. “When I see him, I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I’d done that, Clint, I’m really sorry,’” he opined.
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