“I broke a serious sweat”: the 1979 deleted scene that exhausted Bill Murray on two continents
Over the years, Bill Murray has made an increasing number of cameo appearances onscreen, but the one he put the most effort into was also the only one that wound up on the cutting room floor.
If everybody involved knew what they knew now, that locating Murray and convincing him to lend his talents to a movie is one of the hardest things to achieve in Hollywood, maybe his guest spot wouldn’t have been excised from the film, especially when he’d poured his heart and soul into it.
John Hughes’ 1988 flop, She’s Having a Baby, set the template for the Saturday Night Live veteran to make an unannounced and impromptu outing on the silver screen, which he’s replicated in films like Zombieland, Get Smart, and Dumb and Dumber To, but he’d actually made his first cameo a decade previously.
In his first starring role in a feature, Steve Martin laid down a marker for becoming one of the biggest comedy stars in the business with The Jerk, which cleared $100 million at the box office and has since comfortably settled into its groove as one of the consensus picks to sit among the greatest studio comedies to ever come out of Tinseltown.
The leading man, Navin R Johnson, who believes he was born as a poor Black child, runs through a series of jobs in an effort to find his place in the world. One of them was supposed to be a dentist, with Murray as his patient, but despite being left out of the final cut, the Ghostbuster remembers it fondly.
“We rehearsed that scene for an hour and a half straight,” he recalled. “I broke a serious sweat, because we just kept doing it, over and over and over again, and he was relentless. Then we went to England, and we did completely different stuff! It was all different, and by that time, we were both secretly directing, so I was like, ‘Let’s play with the camera.'”
Martin and Murray went hell for leather, with the former “stuffing lots and lots of stuff into my mouth” as Johnson’s attempts at dentistry became increasingly painful, both for the character and the guy who was playing it. “It was physically uncomfortable,” the latter added. “It didn’t feel good, but it didn’t matter because we knew we were reaching and passing the threshold.”
He suffered for his art, both in California and England, for the chance to pit his comedic wits against Martin, which was all for naught when The Jerk arrived in cinemas without Murray’s cameo, which must have been a kick in the teeth, having invested so much in a scene that was snipped out of the movie.
Apparently not, though, with Murray still celebrating it as “one of the funniest scenes I ever did, I think,” regardless of the fact that audiences at the time had no idea it even existed.
