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Bill Murray has said he feels he was “barbecued” by a sexual misconduct allegation on the set of a 2022 comedy, which led to the film being cancelled and his reaching a financial settlement with the woman who accused him of straddling her and kissing her. “It wasn’t like I touched her,” said Murray to the New York Times in a new interview. “I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”
Murray defended his actions to the paper, saying that the complainant was “someone that I worked with, that I had had lunch with on various days of the week”. The actor put his actions down to trying to be amusing in a strained and claustrophobic setting.
“We were all stranded in this one room listening to this crazy scene,” he said. “I dunno what prompted me to do it.” The action was one he had previously performed on someone else, he said.
“I thought it was funny, and every time it happened, it was funny,” continued Murray.
He continued: “It was a great disappointment, because I thought I knew someone, and I did not. I certainly thought it was light. I thought it was funny. To me it’s still funny, the idea that you could give someone a kiss with a mask on. It’s still stupid. It’s all it was.”
Production was suspended on Being Mortal, directed by Aziz Ansari, after the crew member filed a complaint against Murray, and was eventually shut down completely.
The film was backed by Searchlight Films, the production company now owned by Disney, which Murray said he feels handled the incident inappropriately.
“It still bothers me because that movie was stopped by the human rights or ‘H&R’ of the Disney corporation,” he said. “It turned out there were pre-existing conditions and all this kind of stuff. I’m like, what? How was anyone supposed to know anything like that? There was no conversation, there was nothing. There was no peacemaking, nothing.”
Once production was suspended, Murray said they “went to this lunatic arbitration”, while recommending that “if anyone ever suggests you go to arbitration: Don’t do it. Never ever do it. Because you think it’s justice, and it isn’t.”
Shortly after the complaint, Murray had said that he hoped the incident could be resolved swiftly. “We’re talking and we’re trying to make peace with each other,” he said, something he appeared to refer to speaking to the New York Times.
“I tried to make peace,” he said. “I thought I was trying to make peace. I ended up being, to my mind, barbecued.
“I don’t go too many days or weeks without thinking of what happened in Being Mortal.”
Murray, 74, remains one of the US’s most iconic comedians for his roles on Ghostbusters, Saturday Night Live and many of the films of Wes Anderson.
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A number of directors and co-stars such as Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss and Harold Ramis have said they have not found Murray easy to work with, yet he remains a much-loved star, with sightings of him in the wild often going viral.
In 2014, Harvey Weinstein, then producing one of Murray’s movies, compared the phenomenon to faith. “It’s a religion,” he told Variety, “where you can act as badly as you want to people, and they still love you. I used to feel guilty about behaving badly, and I met Bill, and it feels so much better.”
Murray told Saturday’s New York Times it had taken him many years to reconcile himself to his status as of many people’s most prized celebrity sightings.
“I’ve walked down the street with a hat down over my head, glasses on my eyes. I loved Covid,” he said, going on to say that he put “so much energy” into navigating requests for photographs from strangers.
“What a screw head,” he said. “So now what I do for a living is, I take cellphone photographs. I’m not an actor. I am a donkey that is photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera. … I don’t regret it. I don’t resent it.”
