The 2000s TV series Bill Murray has always dreamed of appearing on: “Looks like a lot of fun”
While he might have something of a cantankerous reputation now that he’s reached the age of 75, Bill Murray also has a brilliant habit of just turning up places, without notice, as though he has no concept of the fact that he’s a famous film star.
There was the time back in 2006, for instance, when he accepted a jokey invitation from a bunch of college students in Scotland to come to their house party, which he did, drinking all their vodka, doing the dirty dishes in the kitchen and then leaving. Then a few years later, when Murray turned up to the construction site of a new poetry library in New York and proceeded to recite poetry to the workers.
Or how about when he was in Austin, Texas and got chatting to a bartender, asking him if he wanted to go and see GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, before deciding he wanted to try his hand at serving drinks, going behind the bar and refusing to give anyone anything other than tequila, no matter what they ordered.
It’s safe to say that Murray probably gets bored easily, and that he enjoys the spontaneous interactions that doing things on a whim will spark, as long as it’s not with green, food-obsessed phantoms, obviously, because that usually leaves him covered in slime in a hotel corridor.
That kind of thinking no doubt informs his favourite TV show, which he revealed during a Reddit ‘Ask me Anything’ a few years back. Quizzed on what he would name as his series of choice, Murray said, “I’d think The Amazing Race. It was like a show I watched in Paris, similar to that. One episode I saw, they had to fight their way to the top of a hotel in Singapore and answer impossible questions. I used to watch it just to see people completely fall apart. They would try to answer, and it would kill them.”
Life often imitates art, and Murray is no stranger to quirky movies and travel, and there’s one film that immediately springs to mind when he added some context towards his love of the show. He added, “The Amazing Race looks like a lot of fun. You get to go to a bunch of places. It calls on all your skills. I tell people, ‘If you want to get married, travel around the world first, cause then you get to know people better.’ It’s a test of wills to travel. I think The Amazing Race would be fun.”
That movie is, of course, Lost in Translation, the 2003 Sofia Coppola effort that sees Murray play a fading, middle-aged American film star trying to find some purpose in what he does, flying out to Japan in order to make a TV advert for whiskey. In a typically spontaneous fashion, although Murray had agreed with Coppola that he would take part in the film without signing a contract, and leaving the director clueless as to whether he would actually turn up on the first day.
Some indication as to how Murray conducts business is the fact that at the time the film was made, the actor had a special ‘1-800’ number for people to ring if they were interested in hiring him for work. Coppola called and sent him letters for months to try to get him to do the movie, pleading with his collaborator Wes Anderson to convince him, who told her, “If he says he’s going to do it, he’ll show up”.
Luckily, he did, and his performance as Bob Harris opposite Scarlett Johansson earned him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’, with Coppola taking home the award for ‘Best Screenplay’.
