FACT CHECKERS UNIT
Murray plays himself in this 2008 short film from director Dan Beers, who had previously worked as an associate producer on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca star as a pair of hypervigilant magazine fact checkers on a mission to verify whether Murray drinks warm milk at bedtime. (Spoiler alert: he does.) Murray donated eight hours of his time to the $12,000 production and reportedly helped the crew lug equipment around the set. In lieu of payment, he asked Beers to buy him a gun. When the director refused, Murray requested a knife instead—“a really big knife, like something I can tie around my leg.” After shooting wrapped, Beers and the crew presented their star with a brand-new twelve-inch hunting knife. “Thanks for this,” Murray said, and promptly vanished.
FANS
As much as he enjoys crashing the occasional kickball game or dropping in on someone’s house party, Murray has little patience for fans who approach him in public. “Half the time they confuse me with someone else,” he said. “‘That one where you were in Vietnam? God, you were funny in that!’”
As for fan mail, don’t bother sending any. He won’t answer it. “I don’t have time for that,” he says. “It’s like there are hundreds of thousands of people that think they’re going to become millionaires getting autographs from movie actors. I don’t have time for those idiots. I got stuff to do. Spelling my name? I did that a long time ago. When I run into someone on the street that’s one thing, but answering mail for a living? Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay … I like a job where you sleep late, get kind of goofy and have some fun.”
FANTASTIC FOUR RADIO SHOW, THE
Murray supplied the voice of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in this nationally syndicated 1975 radio series narrated by Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee. Producer Bob Michelson recruited Murray for the part after working with him on The National Lampoon Radio Hour. John Belushi and Gilda Radner were also invited to join the cast, but both declined. Murray, who did not have a lot of voice-acting experience at this point, agreed to work for scale. Veteran performers Cynthia Adler, Bob Maxwell, and Jim Pappas played the other three members of the superhero team. “Bill was a relative rookie, a wild card and a risk,” said Fantastic Four scriptwriter Peter B. Lewis. “At the time, he was not the strongest of actors.” He often arrived late to recording sessions and routinely flubbed his line readings. He may have been hampered by his unfamiliarity with the Marvel milieu. “To my knowledge, Bill hadn’t heard of the Fantastic Four” when he started work on the series, Lewis admits. Beset by budget problems, The Fantastic Four Radio Show was canceled after a brief thirteen-week run.
FANTASTIC MR. FOX
DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson
WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
RELEASE DATE: November 13, 2009
FILM RATING: ***
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: A vulpine rascal makes mischief for the local landed gentry.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Clive Badger, attorney and demolitions expert
By all accounts, Murray had the time of his life lending his vocal talents to this endearing stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel. “We really did have a chunky good time for the amount of work we did on this movie,” he remarked of the less-than-arduous recording process, which saw the cast and crew decamp to a country estate in Connecticut to commune with the farm animals they were bringing to life. Much of the dialogue for Fantastic Mr. Fox was recorded “live” on location, rather than in a studio. The actors spent their working hours galloping through fields and squatting in the dirt to simulate frantic digging while boom mike operators shadowed their every move. At night, the bacchanal began. “We recorded during the day and then at night we would have these magnificent meals and we would all tell stories,” Murray told a gathering of Reddit inquisitors in 2014 during an “Ask Me Anything” session. “We had a lot of great food, a lot of great wine, and great stories. It went on until people started literally falling from their chairs and being taken away.”
Playing a more sympathetic lawyer than the sleazebags he portrayed in Wild Things and Speaking of Sex, Murray brought his trademark improvisational brio to his performance as Clive Badger—though the final characterization was somewhat muted by director Wes Anderson. Murray had intended to give Badger a “beatific” Wisconsin accent, but Anderson nixed it. “It was beautiful but no one really cared or noticed,” Murray said. “They just went ‘No, maybe not.’ That was the most serious acting work I’ve done in a long time.” One of Murray’s contributions that did make the cut was the epic wolf impersonation he filmed for Mr. Fox’s denouement, where a lone wolf gives a Black Power salute to the assembled animals. “We didn’t use his voice at all, but Bill ran up a hill and gave his best ‘wolf stare’ down on us,” Anderson told Rolling Stone. “We filmed it and the artists used it for inspiration to what ended up on the screen.”
Fantastic Mr. Fox also gave Murray a chance to work with George Clooney for the first time. The two men bonded during the Connecticut recording sessions and ended up taking an impromptu holiday together in northern Italy after the picture wrapped. They would reunite professionally five years later for Clooney’s World War II adventure The Monuments Men. Cementing their unlikely friendship, Murray was one of the invited guests at Clooney’s September 2014 wedding to Amal Alamuddin at the Ca’ Farsetti palace in Venice.
NEXT MOVIE: Ballhawks (2010)
FATHERHOOD
Between 1982 and 1997, Murray sired six sons by two women. His public remarks on the subject of fatherhood often seem to echo the sentiments of Bob Harris from Lost in Translation. “People only talk about what a joyous experience it is, but there is terror,” he said. “Your life, as you know it, is over. It’s over the day that child is born. It’s over, and something completely new starts.” Murray has discussed the importance of ignoring your kids. “If you bite on everything they throw at you, they will grind you down,” he told Esquire magazine. “When my kids ask what I want for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, I use the same answer my father did: ‘Peace and quiet.’ That was never a satisfactory answer to me as a kid—I wanted an answer like ‘A pipe.’ But now I see the wisdom of it: All I want is you at your best—you making this an easier home to live in, you thinking of others.”
“I HAVE TO LOVE YOU, BUT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO IGNORE YOU.”
FIELDS, TOTIE
Morbidly obese comedian and nightclub performer of the 1960s and ’70s. Murray has called her the “benchmark” by which he measures show business professionalism. In 1976, Fields’s left leg was amputated above the knee following unsuccessful surgery to remove a blood clot. Fitted with an artificial limb and confined to a wheelchair, she continued to perform her Las Vegas nightclub act. Murray attended one of her shows in the late 1970s and was blown away by her ability to persevere in spite of her disability. “Her act was rough,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “It was a blues act. Pickled with quarts of schmaltz. Her finale was, she’d sing this song, some piece of original material written for her. She was working on a stool: ‘Any fields that Totie Fields can land on/Long as I’ve got a leg to stand on.’ and she’d try to get up on her one leg and the one wooden one. Oh, she staggered. There was one more line, but it was designed to be drowned out in the applause. She had a wheelchair pusher, but when she’s finished, he doesn’t push her out. He backs her out. He’s backing her into the wings, and she’s waving thank you and goodnight. Kept me awake for hours.”
FORREST GUMP
Murray was one of several A-list actors to turn down the title role in this 1994 best picture winner. Chevy Chase and John Travolta also passed on the part of the dim-witted eyewitness to history. Tom Hanks said yes and earned his second Academy Award for best actor. In a 2014 interview with radio host Howard Stern, Murray admitted that he still hasn’t seen Forrest Gump.
FUNERALS
“I find funerals to be rewarding,” Murray has said. He once described the family funerals he attended as a child as “times of great hilarity, even in times of deepest sadness.” When Murray’s father died in 1967, he and his siblings used the occasion as an opportunity to bust on their fellow mourners. “There were all of us, nine kids in a limousine, just laughing about all the cousins and relatives outside the window going, ‘Get a load of that.’ People are looking at the car going, ‘Oh, it must be so sad in there,’ and we’re just roaring on the inside.”
Murray has attended memorial services for such high-profile celebrities as Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson, and Saturday Night Live costar John Belushi.