The ‘SNL50’ Moments That Made Bill Murray Bawl Like A Baby

Bill Murray expected to laugh as an honored guest at SNL50, but crying wasn’t on his agenda. That’s on you, Bill — who attends a reunion with longtime friends without getting a case of the feels? 

“It was surprisingly emotional," Murray told Sway Calloway on SiriusXM's Sway in the Morning, per Entertainment Weekly. “I wept three times in the show. It really got to me.”

What started the waterworks? “Oh, there were sketches that were dying,” Murray replied (and he wasn’t wrong). “No, I’m kidding.”

The moments that actually got to Murray were those filmed tributes that featured former castmates who’d passed away. “I was watching, and there's a lot of video and history that they’re showing,” he explained. “And I didn’t see it coming, but there was Gilda up there dancing with Steve Martin.”

“I remember being there watching them rehearse that dance number for days and days and days and days," Murray said. “I was crazy about Gilda, and I sort of came apart. I was sitting there in the dressing room with a bunch of people and I couldn’t stop it.”

“Crazy about Gilda” wasn’t an understatement. Murray and Radner enjoyed a torrid romance during their time on SNL, which was great when it was great and torturous when it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t a secret to others on the show. “Billy and Gilda? When you’re changing clothes backstage right next to two people who are involved, oh yeah, you know what’s going on between those two people,” said Jane Curtin in Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.

“I can remember them coming to read-through and fighting,” said Laraine Newman. “And she was furious with him and she’d just told him not to talk to her and he’d be begging her — and this would be acted out in front of all of us.”

Murray and Radner’s popular Nerds sketches became a way to work through relationship issues during live shows, said writer Rosie Schuster. “There was definitely some of that going on,” she explained. “You could probably track what was going on by seeing how they related to each other on the air. … On the “Prom Night” sketch, they were really present. They were both really playing and they were both really good. And they just took off.”

The other moment that got to Murray, unsurprisingly, was “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” the short film in which the late John Belushi plays an old man dancing on the graves of his former castmates, including Radner. It didn’t take long for the short’s irony to become real as Belushi died just a few years later, the first of the original cast to pass away.

Watching the film hasn’t gotten any easier for Murray over the years. “To see that, and to see (Belushi) — see, I could go cry now, just thinking about it — to see that sort of foreshadowing that (director Tom) Schiller sort of intuited to make that, and to miss him.”