Bill Murray Still Has Scars From Where the ‘Groundhog Day’ Groundhog Bit Him

Bill Murray’s most recent promotional tour has taken him everywhere from The Joe Rogan Experience to The Drew Barrymore Show, presumably because she was one of the few Charlie’s Angels cast members that he wasn’t a huge dick to. 

This week, Murray also appeared on Hot Ones, where he answered questions about his career while eating wings doused in extraordinary spicy hot sauce that thankfully didn’t kill him.

Murray talked about his work on Saturday Night Live, his dramatic turn in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and how his real-life bowling skills came in handy on the set of Kingpin. But, of course, host Sean Evans couldn’t interview Murray without bringing up his classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.

Specifically, Evans asked about one famous piece of Groundhog Day lore — the rumor that Murray was bitten by one of the groundhogs that was used during filming, and had to get a rabies shot as a result. Not only did Murray confirm that the story was true, he showed that he still has the scars to prove it.

“That nodule there, that’s from the groundhog,” Murray said while gesturing to the back of his middle finger. “He got me back to back, two days in a row.” After the first bite, Murray even tried to take precautions to ensure that he wouldn't get hurt again, to no avail. “The second day, I was cheating, or I thought I was being smart, and I put some fisherman’s gloves, like steel gloves on, underneath the gloves I was wearing,” Murray recalled. “His teeth went right through the steel.”

While reliving the same ordeal over again was certainly in keeping with the theme of the movie, Murray obviously wasn’t happy. “I got upset with the animal wrangler. I said, ‘Who the hell trained this gopher?’ You know, self-righteous actor stuff,” Murray confessed. The keepers of the groundhog were just a “young couple” who responded to Murray’s “rage” by explaining that the groundhog they were using was “rather wild.” 

“We caught him just over that way, over there by that field,” the wranglers told Murray. “We caught him there like two weeks ago.”

Yeah, apparently the groundhog who played Punxsutawney Phil in Groundhog Day wasn’t a trained Hollywood performer, or even a domesticated weather-predicting pet rodent, it was just a wild animal who was living in the woods less than a month before filming began, which explains why he had no qualms about chowing down on the star of Ghostbusters. “You get what you pay for,” Murray mused. 

Although the groundhog may have been a literal pain for Murray to work with, perhaps we should all be glad that the filmmakers chose to bring in a real animal and not simply use a janky puppet à la Caddyshack.