10 Things We Learned After a Weekend With Bill Murray
While reporting my recent Rolling Stone feature on Bill Murray, I spent a weekend in Toronto, attending the world premiere of St. Vincent, going to a screening of Ghostbusters at the official “Bill Murray Day,” talking to his friends and collaborators, partying with the star at a Toronto nightclub, and conducting an interview with him the next morning. Murray eyed my shirt, which was different than the one I had worn the night before: “You changed,” he said, genuinely surprised. We sat in a suite on the 22nd floor of a luxury hotel; he seemed visibly skeptical of the notion of being interviewed, but willing to talk, since we had both ended up in the same room.
Here are 10 things I learned about Bill Murray that weekend that didn’t make it into the article:
1. He’s moved by his own work.
Not that he wants people to know. Watching St. Vincent for the first time with a crowd, he was pleased to discover that they were responding to the story of a crusty, hostile veteran and the young boy next door he ends up befriending. Then he realized he was getting emotional himself: “Oh my God, I’m starting to get tears in my eyes. I’m thinking if the lights come up and I’m crying, that’s really bad. That’s a really bad moment that I will become infamous for. I’d rather start stabbing myself in the stomach with a pen than cry. I really had to pull it together.”
2. He wants to return to the theater.
Asked what he wants to do that he hasn’t done yet, Murray immediately said, “Oh, I’d like to write a play.” Murray started out doing theater — both in Chicago, where studied with improv guru Del Close, and in New York, where before Saturday Night Live he appeared in the theatrical revue The National Lampoon Show. “It resonates with me,” Murray said. “It’s where I started and I think it’s all theater, in a funny way.” Acting in movies suits his short attention span, but he appreciates the immediate, visceral impact of being live in front of an audience: “Writing is stepping back from that because it’s mental, it’s just words on a page.” So does he have a specific play in mind? “Absolutely not,” he said, laughing. “That’s the problem. I feel like my destiny is to do that, but I haven’t gotten around to it.
It took an enormous act of stomach-pen-stabbing will not to quote back his lines from Tootsie, where he nailed his supporting role as a frustrated playwright: “I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained” or “I don’t like it when people come up to me after my plays and say, ‘I really dug your message, man’ or ‘I really dug your play, man, I cried.’ You know, I like it when people come up to me the next day, or a week later, and they say, ‘I saw your play. What happened?'”
3. His performance in St. Vincent contains elements of his own family.
“I see the whole family lineage in the body, the way everyone moves. I see my brother, my father. I wasn’t thinking so much of my grandpa, but he’s definitely a formative influence. He used to pop his choppers out. He got his teeth knocked out somehow, and he could make his lower bridge come out and scare the hell out of small children.”