The one movie that made Bill Murray almost quit acting: “I thought I should stop”
It feels remarkable that Bill Murray has accrued an extensive list of feature movie credits across various genres because, famously, the actor has made himself notoriously hard to contact. It is one of the more unusual tales of Hollywood mythology that deserves exploring.
The truth is, Murray has always been a little complicated to connect with. The actor is now as famous for his inability to play nice with his co-stars as he is for making some of them, and his fans, lifelong friends. It’s a duality that runs through everything Murray does. At points, he is an unstoppable icon and others an uncomfortable uncle. A real stinker hangs around the corner for every great movie he has made. He is one of the funniest men in cinematic history with an unmistakable darkness.
Tales of the Ghostbusters legend’s random appearances at house parties, weddings, and other assorted events have become the stuff of legend, with Murray himself explaining why he’s avoided having an agent, a mobile phone, or even an email address. He said: “I had a house phone, and it would just ring and ring. Finally, I’d pick up the phone and I’d say, ‘Who in the f*ck is calling me and letting my phone ring like that?’ The agent would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m calling for so-and-so.’ I’d say, ‘Look, you can’t do this. This is my house. If I don’t answer the phone, don’t do that because you’re making me not like you.’”
Of course, regular collaborators like Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch know exactly how to reach him safe in the knowledge that he’s virtually guaranteed to agree to their next project together, but the latter’s 2005 dramatic comedy Broken Flowers left Murray feeling as if he’d reached a professional crossroads, to the extent that he considered leaving the acting business altogether.
Murray starred as a retired computer magnate who chooses to spend the remainder of his life doing nothing after his girlfriend left him. However, when he gets a letter from another former flame claiming he has a 19-year-old son, he’s eventually convinced to head out to visit the most likely exes in an effort to discover the truth.
During a Reddit AMA, Murray explained that he enjoyed both his personal experience and Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers as a whole so much that he was seriously considering self-imposed exile from the silver screen, because he was unsure if he’d ever be able to top it: “I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said, ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that I could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’ So he found those locations”.
He added: “And I did the movie. And when it was done, I thought, ‘this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.’ I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realised, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then six, seven months later, someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months, I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.”
It’s been almost two decades since Broken Flowers released – with Murray reuniting with Jarmusch for The Limits of Control and The Dead Don’t Die during that period, but things could have turned out a lot differently had he decided to call it quits in the immediate aftermath.
