Anjelica Huston was exposed to the best and worst of Bill Murray: “He was a shit to me”
Everyone knows that Bill Murray has always been a complicated guy, and no actor or filmmaker even knows which Bill Murray they’re going to get until he turns up on set.
Sometimes, he can be a dream to work with, showing the utmost professionalism from the first day of shooting to the last, forging bonds with his co-stars and colleagues, who walk away from the experience but nothing but nice things to say about the veteran comedy legend.
On other occasions, he can be a fucking nightmare. Whether that’s threatening directors with physical violence, verbally abusing his fellow actors, throwing producers into lakes, or vanishing off the face of the planet, Murray is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a recluse wrapped in a total dickhead.
The unpredictable is the only thing that can be predicted whenever Murray is around, unless your name is Wes Anderson, in which case you can be pretty confident that he won’t ruffle any feathers. We say pretty confident, because Anjelica Huston didn’t have the best time dealing with him when they collaborated under the auteur’s direction.
“He was a shit to me on Life Aquatic,” she told Vulture. “The first week I was there, we were all in this little hotel, and he invited the entire cast to go and have dinner, except me. And everyone came down for dinner, a little dog-faced about my not being invited, and they were all like, ‘Oh, you know, we don’t really want to go’. That was worse than anything.”
Understandably, the Academy Award winner was “really hurt” by his actions, and that wasn’t the last time they butted heads, either. “We were doing a scene at Gore Vidal’s house in Ravello, and he said, ‘Hey, how’ve you been? I missed you’,” Huston recalled. “I said, ‘You’re full of shit. You didn’t miss me.'”
That makes it sound like she doesn’t have a kind word to say about Murray, but that’s not the case. When her husband, Robert Graham, passed away in 2008, he was one of the few Hollywood figures in attendance. “He couldn’t have been nicer that day,” she offered. “He showed up. A lot of people didn’t.”
That’s basically Murray in a nutshell, though; he made such a negative impression on Huston shooting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that she called him a shit, but a few years later, she had nothing but praise for someone she never got on too well with, taking the time and effort to pay their respects at the funeral of her late spouse.
There’s no point in trying to guess what he’s going to do next, and whether it’ll be a good or a bad thing for the people on the opposite side of the fence, with Huston being exposed to both sides of Murray and feeling rather conflicted about the whole thing.
