The Many Faces of Bill

By Josh Tyrangiel

A few years ago, Bill Murray attended a concert in New York City's Central Park. When the show ended, Murray walked east toward his car. By the time he reached the parking garage, 50 people were dodging traffic to keep up with him. "What's amazing was that Bill was interacting with all of them," says Wes Anderson, Murray's director on three movies, including his latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. "He was leading this hilarious roving mass conversation. It was like street theater. I can't think of anybody else who would a) inspire people to walk with him for 14 blocks and b) find a way to make it a participatory experience."

Murray, 54, usually attracts a crowd when he's out in public, and he admits that he is probably at his funniest and often at his happiest in the spontaneous moments when he is reacting to people reacting to him. "There's a lot of goodwill out there," says Murray. "Sometimes I walk down the street, and I feel like the mayor of New York. Better. A lot of people don't like the mayor." At the same time, Murray has his limits. "That sweet and generous side of Bill is 100% real," says Dustin Hoffman, who gave Murray his first major dramatic role (over the objections of director Sydney Pollack) in 1982's Tootsie. "But he's a tough, working-class guy, and he has a very strong sense of right and wrong. I don't know how it works, but if you mess with it, well, he would have done very well in Golden Gloves had he chosen to go that route."

All great comedians begin their career leading audiences around by the nose, but over the years, one of two things tends to happen: the comedian either self-destructs (as in the case of Murray's fellow Second City alums John Belushi and Chris Farley) or, worse, the power shifts, and the comedian finds himself chasing after the audience. "There are a lot of people in this field who are extraordinarily needy," says Lorne Michaels, executive producer and a creator of Saturday Night Live. "It's a very hard thing not to give an audience what they want, and it's so easy, so gratifying to give in. But if Bill has neediness in him, he's always kept it a secret. That's why other performers admire him so much. He never gives in."

The wisdom of that strategy has recently become self-evident. While Eddie Murphy toils in kids' movies, Steve Martin keeps remaking his remake of Father of the Bride and Robin Williams plays psychopaths as restitution for the saccharine sins of his Patch Adams period, Murray has not only remained funny but has transcended funny. The man who taught a generation how to rebel with a smirk in Meatballs, Stripes and Ghostbusters has forsaken easy laughs and giant paychecks to play a series of sad, complicated characters like Herman Blume, the lonely industrialist in Anderson's Rushmore; Bob Harris, the fading movie star in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation; and now Steve Zissou, the dreamy, arrogant, incompetent but good-hearted oceanographer in The Life Aquatic. "Before," says Hoffman, "he was masking his depth--or at least shrouding it--with comedy. Now if the comedy isn't there, he allows us to see his nakedness."

In the process, Murray has redefined himself as an Oscar-nominated actor unrivaled at portraying middle-aged regret. At the same time, he has become something like the new Harvey Keitel but with a bigger paycheck--the favorite star of a generation of distinctive and mostly younger filmmakers, including Anderson, Coppola and Jim Jarmusch, who will direct Murray's next film, a still untitled project set for release later this year. For directors like those, Murray's inwardness, his air of wounded integrity, his sheer, irreducible strangeness operate as correlatives for their originality as filmmakers. And Murray in turn can sometimes lead his fan base to take a chance on their idiosyncratic films.

Murray knows that all this means he has reached an enviable career sweet spot. "I don't know. I'm ready to die, I guess," he says in a parody of earnestness. "But, yeah, I get it. Things have come around, and my way of operating has turned out to be great for me, and people seem to trust my stuff. It's cool to have proved that you can have what you want without selling yourself completely to hell. Jeez, I'm really crowing, huh?"

He is far too obstreperous to sit still and be deconstructed, but after a long day of promoting The Life Aquatic in interviews for local newspapers from around the country, Murray, with a glass of Scotch in his hand and an empty New York City hotel suite at his disposal, seems relaxed. Not just for the moment but in life. Even his failure to win a 2004 Oscar for Lost in Translation was, he insists, no big deal. (As a spoof of his supposed disappointment over losing the Best Actor award to Sean Penn, Murray appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman a few weeks later, wearing his tuxedo while rolling in a gutter.) By then, Murray had begun work on The Life Aquatic, which opened to mixed reviews but mostly warm ones for his performance. While he has described the hours on location off the coast of Italy as a scuba version of the Stations of the Cross, Murray believes he has found a true artistic comrade in Anderson, who also directed him in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. "I don't think most people know what's happening to them while they watch his movies," says Murray. "With this last one, he doesn't hit you with big punches, it doesn't end with an explosion, but it works on your emotions in a really fascinating and complicated way."

As Steve Zissou, a mix of underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau and infomercial king Ron Popeil, Murray again plays a middle-aged man disappointed by what he has become. The actor has tremendous admiration for Anderson's ability to write flawed characters that have reservoirs of humor and dignity. For example, it takes a while for Zissou to get on the road to redemption because his ego is so achingly monumental. When he tells his wife (Anjelica Huston) about a grown man who may or may not be his illegitimate son (Owen Wilson), Zissou says, "I believe in the boy." "Why?" she asks. "Because he looks up to me," he responds.

On film sets Murray's dedication to an inner code of ethics--and his demand that others follow it--has earned him a reputation for being difficult. (During the making of Charlie's Angels, he and Lucy Liu engaged in a feud over creative differences, reportedly causing production to shut down for a day.) For someone who has built his life around the idea of team play and who continually mocks all pretense to self-importance, difficult is a word that cuts deep. "If it keeps obnoxious people away, that's fine," he says defensively. "It makes me think of that line--you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. People say this to you with a straight face, and I always say, 'Who. Wants. Flies?'" A moment passes, and Murray changes his tone. "Oh, difficult. You know, difficult. Well, I have this avenging-angel side, and it is not always a good thing."

Murray, who grew up in a blue-collar family, suggests that his outbursts are generally spurred by a still fiery sense of class resentment and empathy for the underdog. On the set of his new film for Jarmusch, Murray got into a fracas with the location manager when he arrived at a rented house for a scene with child actors and discovered that there was no heat. When he started a fire in the fireplace, the location manager told him to stop. "'Who are you?'" Murray says, whispering, as he recalls the story, in the same intimidating hush he used at the time. "She said, 'I'm locations.' I said, 'Well, if locations had done their job and made sure it was warm enough for these people, we wouldn't be lighting a fire in the fireplace.'" But at the wrap party, Murray approached the woman again. "I said, 'You know, we had our moment, and I don't apologize for that for a second.'" But she had excelled at other aspects of her job, and Murray told her so. "I wanted to let her know I could see it both ways."

"He's not malicious," says Harold Ramis, who directed Murray in Caddyshack and Groundhog Day. "He's just a ronin or a samurai in his commitment to no existing authority. I don't know what the standard is he's upholding, but when someone is acting outside of it, he will do whatever he feels is necessary to bring them into line." Ramis continues, "But it's also very hard being the kind of star he is. Few scripts are perfect, and every movie Bill's been in, he's put on his shoulders and made infinitely better. That's an incredible burden on his creativity and leadership, but he's so suspicious and his standards are so high that he allows very few people to help carry the weight."

Ramis counts himself among the excluded. Despite also working as co-stars in Stripes and both Ghostbusters movies, the two haven't spoken in 12 years. Ramis claims he no longer recalls what precipitated the silence, and Murray says only, "We had a falling out." Nevertheless, Ramis requests, "If you could please attach the words 'he said affectionately' to every quote of mine, I'd really appreciate it because I had and have great affection for Bill. It goes unexpressed and unconsummated at this point, but I'd love to do something with him again."

Other friends of Murray's speak in similar tones, like jilted lovers angling for the chance to be jilted again. "Getting him to read the script for the [as yet unmade] second sequel to Ghostbusters--I don't think he's ever read it, actually," says Dan Aykroyd, one of Murray's fellow Ghostbusters and oldest friends. "He makes business so difficult that I just relate to him as a friend now. I have to."

"An intimate relationship with him is really something," says Hoffman. "We were getting on a plane to shoot a movie in the Dominican Republic"--Andy Garcia's directorial debut, The Lost City, due out in late 2005--"the first time we've worked together in 20 years, and I'm really looking forward to having him as my seatmate. As we sit down, he leans over and says sotto voce, 'Hope you're not the chatty type.' Then he puts on earmuffs, a blindfold and gives me his ass for the next six hours." Hoffman laughs wildly as he tells the story.

No one who knows Murray doubts his essential goodness. ("He'll do anything for anyone when the chips are down," says Aykroyd.) But the cost of his artistic and personal freedom is a kind of eternal vigilance. He is clearly one of the most willful people on earth, but he is also talented enough to make that seem like a trivial flaw. "As a moviegoer, when you see him, you know you're in the hands of someone who has a set of values that he won't veer away from," says Michaels. "It inspires a lot of trust. Plus he's so good." And with the exception of the odd moment of dissonance on a film set, Murray, unlike the characters he plays, seems fundamentally happy too. His choosiness allows him to spend the bulk of his time as a stay-at-home father to his six sons, ages 3 to 22. "It's my favorite gig," he says, "but it's a little early to say how I've done. You know, John Hinckley's folks thought they were doing an O.K. job at one point too."

Murray grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill., the fifth of nine children. Three of his brothers are actors, and a sister Nancy, a Dominican nun, tours the world in a one-woman show as St. Catherine of Sienna. "Bill had to learn how to get attention just to survive," says Murray's older brother, veteran character actor Brian Doyle-Murray. (Doyle-Murray took their grandmother's maiden name because there was already a Brian Murray in Actors' Equity.) "Obviously, he survived."

As a teenager, Bill performed in high school musicals and sang lead in a cover band, the Dutch Masters. ("I thought the name would look good painted on a drumhead," he explains.) Like several of his brothers, he caddied at the Indian Hill Golf Club to help pay his Catholic-school tuition. (Murray's father Edward, a lumber salesman, died in 1967 at age 46 of complications from diabetes; his mother Lucille, a mailroom clerk, died in 1988 of cancer.) It was while caddying that Murray developed his ferocious sense of justice. "As a poor kid carrying a rich guy's bag," says Murray, "you're not supposed to speak unless spoken to--and some people wouldn't even look at you. Then there were others who were extremely gracious, understood where you lived, what your life was like. It was an extraordinary chance to see how the world operates. You learn to spot bad apples real quick."

After graduation, Murray briefly studied pre-med at Regis College in Denver before running out of money, drifting back to Chicago and landing at the improvisational comedy troupe Second City, where his gifts for performance and his nascent moral code merged into the beginnings of the person he is today. "He had a very special talent," recalls Josephine Forsberg, Murray's first improv teacher. "He could project the good part of himself, the part that is optimistic and charming, onto an audience. His darker side he'd show in private, but never onstage. But what I really loved about Billy was that he supported everybody so well."

Second City's first law was that onstage its performers should avoid tension and strive for harmony. "You're supposed to make your fellow actors look good," says Ramis, also an early Second City star. "Bill internalized that ethic more than most. Belushi would come out, and the audience would laugh before he opened his mouth, but then he'd go into an extended character thing that would make the other actors feel superfluous. Bill got other people involved. He had energy, integrity. He was fascinating to watch."

And sometimes scary to watch. Murray was known to go into the audience and rough up customers he felt were not paying proper respect to his fellow actors. "At Second City we were taught that the audience were these wild electrons out there," says Murray. "It was important to please them, but we also had to control them. I mean, when you're actors on a stage, it's you against the world. It's not the audience's show. It's yours."

After he was hired to replace Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, Murray made a name for himself with affectionate renderings of sleazeball characters like Nick, the world's ickiest lounge singer. (His greatest hit was a rendition of the Star Wars theme: "Starrrr Wars! Nothing but Starrrr Wars! Gimme those Starrrr Wars! Don't let them end!") And, as usual, he took it upon himself to stand up for the rest of the cast. When Chase returned to be host of the show in its third season, Murray decked him when tension between Chase and regular cast members came to a head. "Chevy had talent," Murray says. "But we came from that Second City thing of you make the other person look good. Meanwhile, he played himself in sketches all the time."

Murray left Saturday Night Live in 1980 to become a star in Stripes and a phenomenon in Ghostbusters, movies in which he improvised much of his dialogue. Summarizing these early performances, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that Murray's "patent insincerity makes him the perfect emblematic hero for the stoned era." For a man who wanted to be emblematic of nothing and beholden to no one, Murray must have sensed that he was losing control of what he was trying to project. So, he had agreed to do Ghostbusters only if the studio, Columbia, would finance a remake of the 1946 drama The Razor's Edge with him as the lead. The move paid dividends later, but when The Razor's Edge was first released, Murray took a critical beating. "It's sort of a classic thing where people say, 'Well, now I'm going to do something serious,'" says Murray. "If I did it now, I'd do it differently. But I don't regret it."

Following The Razor's Edge, Murray basically took four years off. He studied French at the Sorbonne, traveled extensively and turned down lots of easy money. He was very happy. "A lot of us work in whatever we can and let the locusts come in and clean our bones," says Aykroyd. "Billy's different. He's off on another kind of journey that people, including me, don't always understand. "

Murray does not like to talk about career plans or personal growth--"Are you trying to make me gag?" he asks--but in the early '90s it became obvious that he was charting a new course and evolving as an actor. "Groundhog Day was a transitional movie," says Ramis. As weatherman Phil Connors, Murray was doomed to relive the same day until he got it right, in the process evolving from a surly (but funny) egoist into a sweet (slightly less funny) human being. "In that role he actually got at the edge between the better, higher, gentler Bill and the bad, cranky, dark Bill," says Ramis. "He figured out how to project the entirety of himself through character. When we were making the film, I'd launch into some explanation of the scene we were about to do, and he'd say, 'Just tell me--good Phil or bad Phil?'"

Throughout the '90s, Murray popped up in small parts in movies as distinct as the raunchy Farrelly brothers' bowling comedy Kingpin, the quirky Tim Burton--directed bio-pic Ed Wood, and Wild Things, a film he succeeded in hijacking despite the heavily marketed presence of a lesbian schoolgirl love scene. The movies were O.K., but Murray was better, and in Rushmore he finally found something worthy of his skill. Anderson conceived the role of the pitiable, contemptible but redeemable Herman Blume specifically for Murray (in part because he loved him in The Razor's Edge). Murray was a revelation as a man fighting off soul death.

The acclaim from Rushmore brought an avalanche of offers, almost all of which Murray ignored. In a typically idiosyncratic move, he decided to go agentless in 1999. (Michael Ovitz represented him until 1995.) He has since replaced a powerful talent agency with an automated voice mailbox. He gives out the 800 number sparingly and monitors the messages from his home overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York. "I check in regularly," he says. But then adds, "Sometimes I don't check in. Things get busy. I got stuff to do. But you just can't have the phone ringing in your house all the time. I like to be accessible, but on my own terms."

In Hollywood, that 800 number is held up as Murray's ultimate declaration of independence. It's also good business. By creating an aura of aggressive indifference, Murray is now extremely well paid for his occasional dalliances in grade-Z films. (See Charlie's Angels and Garfield; better yet, don't.) He has also ensured that people who want to work with him really want to work with him. "I've had people say, 'I need you in this movie. You're the only one who can do it,'" says Murray. "And as soon as you say no, they've moved on to George Chakiris."

Sofia Coppola distinguished herself as uncommonly persistent. She left hundreds of messages for Murray before he called her back about her offer to star him in Lost in Translation. "When I finally spoke to him," says Coppola, "he was nice, charming, slightly interested but also vague and mysterious." She says she wasn't certain that Murray had actually agreed to take the part of aging movie star Bob Harris until he showed up in Tokyo on the first day of shooting.

Lost in Translation offered conclusive proof that Murray has made himself into a superb actor. He plays a man who, understanding little of what's being said to him and even less about his actions, forges a relationship with a similarly confused young woman (Scarlett Johansson). Midway through the movie, Harris finds himself half-drunk in a private Tokyo karaoke room singing Roxy Music's More Than This to a group of passed-out Japanese salarymen less than half his age. Murray, the creator of Nick the SNL lounge cretin, never veers from character and never winks at the audience for sympathy. Instead, he turns the song into an awkward, agonizing moment of realization and regret. "That performance," says Hoffman, "is just unbelievable."

Although humor is only a subtle part of his recent film performances, Murray still enjoys making people laugh, and he treats any kind of public appearance--a spot on Letterman, throwing out the first pitch at a Cubs game, his frequent rounds at charity golf tournaments--as a chance to recreate the spontaneous charge of Second City. "The best thing I do all year is Pebble Beach," he says. "There's 18 greens and 18 tees. That's like 36 shows--and that's just the formal rooms."

But Murray has the power to turn any place into his stage. After a long day of talking about himself, he walks into one of New York's fancier restaurants just before closing, with no reservation, dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt and an aggressively unstylish vest. There are no tables immediately available, and so Murray launches into his version of singing for his supper. He makes fun of the hostess's Carolina accent ("Golly, you from around here?"), jokes about the restaurant's d??cor ("I feel a little overdressed") and shakes hands with everyone who comes up to him. In a few seconds, the restaurant is electric, and the employees have disappeared to find a place for him to sit. As they scurry off, he whispers, "I cannot be denied." Like anyone would want to try.