I went five years before we made the second one. “So much of the momentum was about making the money. He has been married and divorced twice (and has six sons) and as his stardom grew, he gained a reputation for feuding with fellow actors or directors, earning him the nickname The Murricane.īut you could also argue he’s an uncompromising performer who never sold out, even when Ghostbusters was a massive hit. Before long, he was studying at Chicago’s Second City improv troop. He avoided jail – he got five years, probation – but had to leave Regis College, where he was taking pre-med courses. On his 20th birthday, he got arrested for smuggling marijuana at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. In his teen years, he was the lead singer of a rock band, Dutch Masters. Murray grew up in a large Irish Catholic family – his mother was a mailroom clerk, his father a lumber salesman. And I would answer the phone as Hunter and take phone calls for him… I could talk like he talked.” Bill Murray with Pablo Pauly in a scene from ‘The French Dispatch’ (Photo: Searchlight Pictures /AP) So I was getting imbued with all this stuff. “Hunter came and lived with me while I was making the movie. So that didn’t work out particularly well. And he didn’t particularly know what he was doing and he thought cocaine was the way to solve scenes. “It had a first-time director – first and last time director. Murray played him in 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, getting so deep into character that when he returned to shoot Saturday Night Live, he was still living like Thompson. The film flopped, however. “He could really put some words together,” says Murray.
“He’s always bringing in a couple of new apples.”īill Murray, Wally Wolodarsky and Jeffrey Wright in a scene from he French Dispatch (Photo: Searchlight Pictures/AP)Īt this point, Murray digresses about author Mark Twain (cue another note-to-self, about re-reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and his old friend Hunter S. In Asteroid City, the next Anderson movie Murray has just finished shooting in Spain, it’s the turn of Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie to be inducted. In The French Dispatch, Del Toro, Chalamet and Elisabeth Moss are among the newbies.
I don’t read it as much as I could or should.” But I think he became devoted to it later. “I mean, I don’t know how found it in Texas.
“I didn’t grow up with it,” admits Murray. Murray’s character is based on Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker, a magazine beloved by Anderson. “He digs in.” Billl Murray has become a cult figure (Photo: Samir Hussein/WireImage)Ī typically droll Anderson comedy, The French Dispatch sees Murray plays Arthur Howitzer Jr, the editor of a cultural foreign supplement of a Kansas newspaper based, somewhat improbably, in 1960s France.įull of invention and brimming with humour, it’s really an anthology of short films (Benicio Del Toro as a jailed artist Timothée Chalamet as a student activist Stephen Park as a chef/police officer) that play as if you’re flicking through an edition of the titular magazine. “He’s the kind of person who really burrows in,” he says, admiringly, of Rylance. I tell him about a new golfing movie, The Phantom of the Open, in which Mark Rylance plays real-life golfer Maurice Flitcroft, and he immediately jots it down on a notepad. “That’s based on a photograph of me just throwing a golf club up in the air,” he says, pointing to the logo. Today, the 71 year-old is wearing grey slacks and a green shirt, part of his own range of golfing apparel (William Murray – where “golf meets irreverence”). I mean if you did nine movies with Wes Anderson… people will call that a career.” I don’t have to go looking for work, anyway. “Because these three people call me up, I worry even less than ever before that someone’s gonna call me up.
“They’ve sort of validated my career in a way, the fact that these great directors keep calling me up every once in a while,” he says. Nonetheless, Anderson, Coppola and Jarmusch have all helped keep the cult of Bill Murray well and truly alive.
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