Bill Murray has had a decades-long career in Hollywood. Despite achieving great success, there’s still one movie he turned down that haunts him to this day.
Murray’s Major Clint Eastwood Regret
While being interviewed on The Howard Stern Show this week, Murray admitted that he still regrets turning down an opportunity to star in a movie directed by the legendary Clint Eastwood.
“Have you ever watched a film and said I want to act with this guy so bad?” Stern, 71, asked Murray, 74.
“A long time ago I was watching the Clint Eastwood movies of the day, like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot or whatever the movies he was making then, and I thought: ‘His sidekick gets killed, and he avenges, but the sidekick gets like a great part, a great death scene,'” Murray replied.
“I was like, I got to call this guy,” he continued. “So I called him out of the blue, and he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy?’ Because I just made Stripes and he had this great idea for an enormous Navy thing.”
“And when he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy,’ like jeez, ‘Would I become like Abbott and Costello?’” Murray added. “I had to do like military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess maybe I shouldn’t.’”
Murray didn’t specify what Eastwood movie this was. However, it’s likely that it was the 1986 dark comedy Heartbreak Ridge, which came out five years after Stripes.
Related: Clint Eastwood, 94, Defiantly Refuses To Retire – He’s ‘Not Done’
It’s One Of Murray’s ‘Few Regrets’
Decades later, Murray still regrets not working with Eastwood on this project.
“But it’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it,” the Caddyshack star admitted. “Because it was a big-scale thing, and I would have gotten a great – I don’t know if I’d have gotten a great death scene, it was more of a comedy that one – but it was great. He had access to World War II boats and he could have like made a flotilla and stuff, and there was some cool stuff in it.”
In fact, Murray regrets this so deeply that he brings it up whenever he sees Eastwood, now 94, around Hollywood.
“And when I see him, I’m like: ‘I’m sorry, I wish I’d done that Clint, I’m really sorry,’” Murray concluded. “He’s certainly well over it. He’s a very resilient fella.”
Related: Clint Eastwood, 94, Is Asked What He Wants His Legacy To Be – His Answer Is Perfection
Murray Discusses Losing Oscar
In this same interview, Murray confessed that he found it to be “surprising” when he lost to Sean Penn at the 2004 Oscars. Murray had been considered a frontrunner in the Best Actor race that year for his work in Lost In Translation. However, it was Penn who ultimately won the Oscar for Mystic River, which happened to be directed by Eastwood (and is also, in our opinion, excellent!)
“It was sort of surprising,” Murray acknowledged. “I won every other prize for Lost in Translation, so I just sort of thought I was gonna win, ’cause I’d won everything — every single one. And then I didn’t win [the Oscar], so I was like, ‘Well…'”
“But, it was kinda good — I realize that I’d actually gotten sort of infected by wanting to win it. It attracted a low-grade virus of the desire for more,” he added. “I had it for about six months; it had to wear off. So I did learn a lesson from it that if I’d won, I might not have ever seen.”
It certainly is interesting to find out the career regrets of Hollywood greats. While it’s sad that Murray never got to appear in an Eastwood movie, he’s still starred in many iconic films over the years. Hopefully that’s a comfort to Murray the next time he bumps into Eastwood!
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