Gwyneth Paltrow Flat-Out Bombed Her Audition for This Bill Murray Classic
What About Bob? has turned out to be one of the more enduring Bill Murray comedies, as much for its hilariously petty behind-the-scenes stories as the movie laughs that still hold up. Murray, who’s on the record as hating his experiences shooting films like Scrooged, sounds like he had fun on this one. “The script wasn’t nearly as annoying as I could be, so I had to improvise a lot in the movie. And even what you eventually see in the movie isn’t close to how really annoying I can be when I put my mind to it,” he told Deseret News, as reported by Ultimate Classic Rock. “It was quite liberating to play someone like that.”
Murray famously got under Richard Dreyfuss’ skin on that movie (Dreyfuss called him an “Irish drunken bully”), but one actor Murray didn’t get to pester was future Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh, she auditioned for the film, but one big factor got in her way: She wasn’t funny — at all.
Paltrow tried out for the role of Dreyfuss’ teenage daughter, Anna, according to the film’s casting director, Glenn Daniels. A famous talent agent named Boaty Boatwright brought Paltrow to Daniels’ office “without even a phone call,” he told Rolling Stone. “She just said, ‘Read her.’ Gwyneth hadn’t done anything at that point. Nothing.”
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In Daniels’ memory, Paltrow approached the audition like a deer in the headlights. “I had no idea what she was doing there,” he said. “But anyway, I read her and she wasn’t funny, and it was a comedy. I had to tell Boaty it wasn’t going to work.”
Paltrow was a Hollywood nepo baby — her parents were Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner, respected working actors but not the kinds of talents that would get Gwyneth cast on her name alone. And she was completely inexperienced. What About Bob? came out in 1991, and the only credit on Paltrow’s IMDb at that point was a 1989 TV movie called High. (That movie’s director? Bruce Paltrow.)
We all know how the story turns out — while Paltrow biffed her chance to work with Dreyfuss and Murray, she soon recovered. By the end of the decade, she’d become a star thanks to her work in Se7en (1995), Emma (1996) and Shakespeare in Love (1998). And her dad didn’t have to direct a single one.
Considering the way Murray abused his castmates between takes on What About Bob? it was probably lucky for Paltrow that she bombed her attempt to be funny.
