By definition, Hollywood stars must have agents and publicists. Not Bill Murray. He has never had a publicist and, five years ago, he fired his agents. “I said I didn’t ever want to speak to them again, and I never did,” he says. “I like to cut my own lawn now. I don’t need a landscaper.”
Now Murray’s only contact with the film business is through a freephone number. If people need to talk to him — perhaps producers who want him to star in a film — they have to call the number and leave a message. (Of course, they have to find the number first.) If he feels like it, he will call back. Often, he doesn’t. Sometimes, he’ll go for weeks without even listening to the messages. It took Sofia Coppola hundreds of phone calls and seven months to get him to look at the script for Lost in Translation. Even then, she wasn’t sure he was going to make the film until he appeared on the set on the first day of the shoot in Tokyo. Other directors have apparently been told to leave scripts in a phone booth somewhere near his home outside New York, up the Hudson River. On a recent film, a production assistant who needed to contact him was told to call his freephone and leave a number for a phone that she would not pick up, so he could call her back without having to talk to her. Of course, he doesn’t see this as strange or eccentric. He likes to be accessible, he says, but on his own terms.
Murray, 54, has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the movie business. He made his sentiments clearest when he gave a eulogy a few years ago at a memorial service for his agent, who had committed suicide. “There are so many people here today I would much rather be eulogising,” he told Hollywood’s elite, with that effortless deadpan. They laughed, of course; but they had to, didn’t they? These days, Murray seems to have come to an uneasy truce with the industry that both succours and repels him. No doubt that’s because, having been rediscovered as an unlikely icon by a younger generation of directors such as Wes Anderson and Coppola, he has finally found the respect for which he has so long yearned. Last year, he won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination as best actor for Lost in Translation, in which he played the ageing movie star Bob Harris, whose platonic relationship in Tokyo with Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) so captured audiences.
He has come a long way from Meatballs and Caddyshack.
Murray has now starred in a trio of films directed by Anderson: Rushmore, the oddball 1998 comedy that began Murray’s reinvention, playing an alcoholic industrialist; 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums; and now The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a quirky comedy-cum-Boy’s Own adventure yarn, replete with pirates and submarines. Murray plays Zissou, a washed-up oceanographer and documentary film-maker modelled somewhat on Jacques Cousteau.
Zissou, who is as egotistical, cantankerous, moody and mercurial as Murray can be, and as genuinely sweet and generous as Murray can also be, is setting out on his final voyage, on his ship, the Belafonte, to find the killer jaguar shark that has eaten his longtime partner, Esteban. Costing $50m, shot for five months on location in Italy, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and Michael Gambon, The Life Aquatic is easily Anderson’s biggest and most ambitious film.
“It was also by far the hardest film I have ever done,” says Murray, walking restlessly around a New York hotel room. As he works up a sweat, he takes off his leather waistcoat to reveal a black Blues Brothers T-shirt and a comforting paunch. He is barefoot, curiously. And, for some reason, his thinning grey hair has been cut in what could be mistaken for a mohawk. I am too surprised to ask why. “It was the most physically demanding, the most emotionally demanding — personally and professionally — and, I think, the most ambitious,” he adds. Murray found it particularly hard to be away from his family for so long. He has six sons, aged between 3 and 22: four with his second wife, two from his first marriage. “So many moments on this film were informed by my own life: my own life with my father and my own life as a father.” Much of the film’s drama centres on Zissou’s relationship with a pilot, played by Wilson, who claims to be Zissou’s son.
I ask Murray why he thinks he has become a touchstone for the younger generation of Hollywood directors. It’s partly a matter of imprinting, he says — that they were coming of age, thinking about the possibility of becoming film-makers, around the time he was a big star, the early 1980s. “Wes probably saw me when he was 13 or some dumb thing, you know. ‘Yeah, Bill Murray could be my dad. He’d be a great dad. He’s funny and he wouldn’t get too mad at me.’” But it is mainly because he has “never done anything really too horrible”, he says. “I’ve never really embarrassed myself.” Somehow, though, those directors have done something utterly improbable with William James Murray over the past five years. They saw in him something Hollywood had never seen before — something hidden in that pudgy, malleable, acne-scarred face, in the deep bags under his eyes, in the irredeemable melancholy that oozes from every ageing pore.
“I saw him as a leading man,” says Coppola. “Bill Murray is hot. Different women have said that to me.” Wow. Now there’s a twist: Bill Murray as a romantic lead, albeit a sad, complicated romantic lead, dealing with the regrets and disappointments of late middle age. But that is the surprising niche Murray has now cut for himself. Who would have thought it? Murray grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in suburban Chicago. He was the fifth of nine children. “The forgotten middle child of nine,” he says. “Well, four or five of us were forgotten.” His father, a lumber salesman, died when Murray was 17. He helped pay his way through college by working as a caddie on a local golf course from the age of 13. That provided a lot of material for Caddyshack, in which he plays a crazed Vietnam-vet groundsman. It also gave this “poor kid carrying a rich guy’s bag” a strong sense of propriety, of how people should be treated. Even now, he recalls that some golfers did not deign to look at him, while others were “extremely gracious”.
At first, Murray wanted to become a doctor but, fairly quickly, he dropped out of medical school. Returning to Chicago, he joined the celebrated Second City improv comedy troupe, in which stars such as John Belushi, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy and Gilda Radner also kick-started their careers. Like them, Murray graduated to the television series Saturday Night Live, joining in its second season. He left in 1980 to make the military comedy Stripes.
In 1982, he had an uncredited role in Tootsie, playing Dustin Hoffman’s playwright roommate.
But 1984 was to prove Murray’s pivotal year. He was desperate to make a mark as a dramatic actor, and wanted to star as the Lost Generation spiritual seeker Larry Darrell — “I am Larry Darrell,” he told the producer after reading the script — in the film adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Because Murray would not be playing comedy, Columbia Pictures was not keen to make the film. To get it made, Murray reluctantly agreed to star in the studio’s Ghostbusters. The slimy supernatural movie became a huge hit, the biggest comedy ever up until then, taking $230m. Overnight, it turned Murray into Hollywood’s hottest comic star. The Razor’s Edge, in which he had much more invested emotionally, was a flop of equally monumental proportions. It was a devastating blow to Murray, one that rankles even today.
“The Razor’s Edge comes out and people were like, ‘If this guy ever tries to do anything that’s not a comedy again, he should be arrested,’” he recalls. “With The Razor’s Edge, I didn’t really understand the reaction, but it still didn’t make me feel good. And the great success of Ghostbusters — I just didn’t think I could handle it.
