Bill Murray Was An ‘Irish Drunken Bully’ on the Set of ‘What About Bob?’
For a comedian as beloved as Bill Murray, the guy sure has a long history of bad behavior. He spent six figures paying off that “much younger” crew member he straddled on the set of Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut. He yelled at Geena Davis on the set of Quick Change when he wasn’t trying to use a vibrating massager on her off-camera. He told Lucy Liu she “couldn’t act” during Charlie’s Angels, earning punches in return. But he saved some of his worst behavior for What About Bob?, his hit ‘90s comedy with Richard Dreyfuss.
Far Out recently rounded up a series of troubling stories about Murray on that film’s set, including throwing producer Laura Ziskin in a lake. She told the Los Angeles Times that Murray tossed her in “playfully,” but the argument leading up to it was anything but. If only that was the end of it.
“Bill also threatened to throw me across the parking lot and then broke my sunglasses and threw them across the parking lot,” she explained. “I was furious and outraged at the time, but having produced a dozen movies, I can safely say it is not common behavior.”
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Not common behavior for most actors, but unfortunately, all too common for Murray. Things were just as bad between the comedian and his What About Bob? co-star, Dreyfuss. “Terribly unpleasant experience,” Dreyfuss told The A.V. Club. “We didn’t get along, me and Bill Murray.”
Things got especially bad when “Bill just got drunk at dinner,” Dreyfuss explained. “He came back from dinner one night, and I said, ‘Read this script tweak, I think it’s really funny.'”
Apparently, Murray didn’t like the rewrite. “He put his face next to me,” Dreyfuss said. “Nose-to-nose. And he screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!'”
That wasn’t the end of it. “There was no time to react because he leaned back and took a modern glass-blown ashtray. He threw it at my face from only a couple of feet away. And it weighed about three-quarters of a pound,” Dreyfuss remembered.
Lucky for everyone, Murray’s weapon missed its target, even though “he tried to hit me,” Dreyfuss said. “I got up and left.”
The stories continued to leak out years after the film’s production. After Murray’s incident on the Ansari film in 2022, Dreyfuss’ son Ben took to social media with more complaints, including an allegation that Murray ripped eyeglasses off Ziskin’s face “because he wanted an extra day off.”
Things got so bad that filming actually halted at one point, according to Ben Dreyfuss. “Everyone walked off the production and flew back to L.A., and it only resumed after Disney hired some bodyguards to physically separate my dad and Bill Murray in between takes.”
Murray later justified his actions to Entertainment Weekly — hey, abusing Dreyfuss was just a form of method acting. “It worked for the movie,” he claimed. “I mean, I drove him nuts, and he encouraged me to drive him nuts.”
Sure, Bill. “He was an Irish drunken bully,” Dreyfuss later said. “I didn’t talk about it for years.”
