Stars Who Can't Stand Bill Murray

Ever since joining the cast of "Saturday Night Live" in its 2nd season, Bill Murray has been a comedy superstar. From his early films (Canadian summer camp comedy "Meatballs," military spoof "Stripes") to the mega-success of "Ghostbusters" and "Groundhog Day," the Chicago native has remained one of Hollywood's most venerated and universally embraced entertainers. That's remained true as he's branched out beyond comedy and landed critically acclaimed performances in such films as "Rushmore" (which started his long association with director Wes Anderson), "Lost in Translation" (earning him an Oscar nomination), "Broken Flowers," and more.

Murray has long had a reputation for marching to the beat of his own drum. He famously doesn't have an agent representing him, with anyone wishing to contact him instead calling an 800 number. If he likes the idea, he'll return the call — a system that went hilariously awry when he agreed to voice the titular feline in "Garfield" under the belief that Joel Cohen, who wrote the screenplay, was Joel Coen of "The Big Lebowski" and "Fargo" fame.

His quirky personality and hilariously deadpan delivery have made him a beloved figure with fans, yet that hasn't always been the case when it comes to those who've worked with him. Recent years, in fact, have seen numerous unsavory stories emerge, pointing to a far darker side than his cinematic work would indicate. Keep on reading for a look at some stars who can't stand Bill Murray.

Chevy Chase became the breakout star during the 1st season of "Saturday Night Live," exiting partway through the following. When he returned to host in the 3rd season, he was reportedly loathed by his former co-stars. Bill Murray, who'd joined the show as his replacement, was particularly displeased with Chase, leading to a now-legendary backstage fistfight between the two. As detailed in "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live," tension between Chase and Murray had been building up all week. The two had been exchanging insults before finally throwing punches at each other five minutes before the show was about to go live. 

Decades later, Chase discussed the altercation during an interview with Time. "I discovered later it was with the instigation of John Belushi, who apparently was a little bit jealous that I had become the standout guy the first year, when John [felt he] deserved to," he recalled. Speaking with Empire, Murray also looked back on their brief battle, insisting that the passage of time has brought the whole thing far more gravity than it deserves. "It was really a Hollywood fight, a 'Don't touch my face!' kind of thing," he said, remembering how his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, got in between them and broke things up. "So it was kind of a non-event," he added, insisting that he and Chase had gotten over it. Just a few years later, in fact, the pair co-starred in the classic golf comedy "Caddyshack."

Bill Murray co-starred with "Jaws" alum Richard Dreyfuss in the 1991 comedy "What About Bob?", and it's fair to say their working relationship was hardly a love fest. Murray confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that they didn't get along, but Dreyfuss added a very disturbing anecdote about the actor's behavior toward him on the set. "He was an Irish drunken bully, is what he was," Dreyfuss told Yahoo! Entertainment. He recalled that the inebriated comedian exploded when he suggested some script changes. "And he put his face next to me, nose-to-nose. And he screamed at the top of his lungs, 'Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!'" Dreyfuss recalled. That was only the warm-up act, with Murray following up by hurling a heavy glass ashtray at his co-star. "He threw it at my face from [only a couple feet away]," Dreyfuss said. "And it weighed about three quarters of a pound. And he missed me. He tried to hit me. I got up and left."

To be fair, Murray has suggested that he deliberately tried to get under his co-star's skin as a form of method acting to amp up the tension between their characters. "While he was talking, I got in real close to crowd him, I put my head on his shoulder, screamed into his ear and did all sorts of annoying things," Murray said in a 1991 interview with Deseret News. "Some of that was even in the script ... no wait, none of that was in script. I made it all up."

Bill Murray made his directorial debut with the 1990 heist comedy "Quick Change" and co-starred with "Thelma & Louise" star Geena Davis. In her memoir "Dying of Politeness," Davis recalled an uncomfortable meeting with Murray about the film. According to the actress, she had to resist his continual attempts to use an electric massager on her. "I said no multiple times, but he wouldn't relent," Davis wrote. "I would have had to yell at him and cause a scene if I was to get him to give up trying to force me to do it; the other men in the room did nothing to make it stop."

Murray apparently responded to being rebuffed by being unnecessarily mean to her while filming. As she recalled in an interview with the "On with Kara Swisher," podcast, they were shooting on location when Murray began yelling at her, in full view of the crowd that had assembled to watch them film. "I was literally shaking ... he got the opportunity to really put me in my place and really shamed me," she said. 

Davis said her perception of Murray was permanently altered by what he'd put her through, and she would never again be able to enjoy watching one of his performances. "[H]e comes off as an affable, fun-loving guy, and many times he was or could be," she mused to Vanity Fair. "But once I had that experience, on day one of the movie, then everything about him after that was completely colored by knowing what lurks within."

Long before he appeared on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or played Scott Evil in the "Austin Powers" movies, Seth Green was a child actor. While appearing on YouTube talk show "Good Mythical Morning," he recalled one of those early gigs — appearing in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch featuring Bill Murray, who was hosting. According to Green, he encountered the actor backstage. "He saw me sitting on the arm of this chair and made a big fuss about me being in his seat," Green recalled. "And I was like, 'That is absurd. I am sitting on the arm of this couch. There are several lengths of this sofa. Kindly eff-off.' And he was like, 'That's my chair.'"

Murray decided to teach the youngster a harsh lesson in the showbiz pecking order, given that he was a huge star and Green was just a kid. To get across his point, Murray allegedly grabbed Green and held him upside down by his ankles. "He dangled me over a trash can and he was like, 'The trash goes in the trash can,'" the "Robot Chicken" alum said. "And I was screaming, and I swung my arms, flailed wildly." The whole thing came to a painful conclusion when Murray released his grip, sending Green crashing headfirst into the trash can. "I was horrified," Green admitted. "I ran away, hid under the table in my dressing room and just cried."

During his 1990s stint hosting "Saturday Night Live," Bill Murray was apparently no fan of the season's cast, which included David Spade, Adam Sandler, and comedian Chris Farley. "He's super nice to fans — he wasn't very nice to us," Rob Schneider recalled during an interview on SiriusXM's "The Jim Norton & Sam Roberts" radio show. "He hated us on 'Saturday Night Live' when he hosted. Absolutely hated us. Seething." 

Farley, in particular, took the brunt of Murray's disdain. "He hated Chris Farley with a passion," Schneider claimed. "Like seething looking at him." The "Deuce Bigalow" star insisted he wasn't entirely sure of the reason, but theorized it could have been Farley's obsessive emulation of John Belushi's substance-abusing, out-of control behavior — not entirely implausible, given that both Belushi and Farley died of drug-related causes at the age of 33. "He really hated Sandler too," Schneider added, once again not really understanding why. "Murray hated him." Still, Schneider took solace in his belief that Murray hated him less than the rest of the cast. "The least of the hate was to me [and] I took great pleasure in that he hated me less, because he's my hero," he quipped.

Lucy Liu was joined by Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz for "Charlie's Angels," with Bill Murray as their handler, Bosley. While appearing in the Los Angeles Times' "Asian Enough" podcast, Liu recalled rehearsing a scene that Murray had allegedly rewritten without telling anyone. She began to notice he was making off-handed insults that seemed to be aimed at her. "I was, like, 'Wow, he seems like he's looking straight at me," she said. Uncertain whether what she felt was happening was actually happening, she confronted him. "I say, 'I'm so sorry. Are you talking to me? '— and clearly he was, because then it started to become a one-on-one communication," she added. 

Finding the language he was using to be "inexcusable and unacceptable," she decided to call him out, even though she was far less well-known than any of her co-stars. "I stood up for myself, and I don't regret it," she said. "Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there's no need to condescend or to put other people down."

In a subsequent interview with The Times, Murray seemingly defended his behavior, but without referencing Liu by name. "Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me," he said. "When our relationship is professional, and you're not getting that done, forget it."

McG (aka Joseph McGinty Nichol) has been director and producer of numerous movies and worked with Bill Murray when he directed "Charlie's Angels." In a 2009 interview with The Guardian, McG bragged about getting into physical altercations with the actors he's worked with. "I don't think there's been a film I've made where there hasn't been some kind of physical fight," he said. "I mean, I've been headbutted by an A-list star. Square in the head. An inch later and my nose would have been obliterated." Asked to reveal that particular thespian's identity, McG initially hesitated. "Nah, I probably shouldn't," he said, but then quickly relented. "But it was Bill Murray. Y'know, it's a passionate industry."

When he was asked about McG's claims during an interview with The Times, Murray flat-out denied it had ever happened. "That's b*******!" Murray declared. "That's complete crap. I don't know why he made that story up. He has a very active imagination." Murray continued to diss the director, and he held nothing back. "No! He deserves to die!" he said, before offering a very specific manner in which he'd like to see that happen. "He should be pierced with a lance, not head-butted," Murray added.

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were friends and frequent collaborators, co-starring in "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters and having known each other since their days in Second City. When Ramis directed Murray in the beloved 1993 comedy "Groundhog Day," however, their creative differences led to bitter clashes that created a serious rift in their friendship. Communication between the two had become so strained that producers insisted Murray hire an assistant who could act as a go-between. Murray did as he was told, but hired an assistant who was both deaf and mute and could only communicate via American sign language — which the actor promised he'd try to learn. "That's anti-communication," Ramis told Entertainment Weekly. "You know, 'Let's not talk.'"

Following "Groundhog Day," Murray and Ramis — who died in 2014 — didn't speak for two decades. In her 2018 book, "Ghostbuster's Daughter: Life with My Dad, Harold Ramis," the director's daughter, Violet Ramis Stiel, shared her remembrances. As she wrote, her father "tried not to take it personally," but nevertheless felt stung by Murray completely severing all ties with him. According to Stiel, Ramis was "heartbroken, confused and yet unsurprised by the rejection."

Murray finally reached out to Ramis while he lay on his deathbed, having lost the ability to communicate. According to Stiel, he paid her father a 7 a.m. visit, accompanied by a police escort and brandishing donuts. The actor spent a couple hours speaking to Ramis.

Anjelica Huston worked with Bill Murray in Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums" before they teamed up again for the director's next film, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." It was while making the latter, Huston recalled in an interview with Vulture, that Murray was less than kind. "He was a s*** to me on 'Life Aquatic,'" Huston said, remembering how the cast and crew were all staying in a small hotel in Italy when the actor invited everyone to dinner — except her. "And everyone came down for dinner, a little dog-faced about my not being invited, and they were all like, 'Oh, you know, we don't really want to go,'" she said. "That was worse than anything."

According to Huston, production then moved to Florence, where they wound up in a scene together. When Murray asked how she was doing, claiming he'd missed her, she called him out: "I said, 'You're full of s***. You didn't miss me.' He looked all confused for a moment." After that, she revealed, he was far better behaved toward her. She apparently forgave him when he attended the funeral of her husband, sculptor Robert Graham. "He couldn't have been nicer that day," she said. "He showed up. A lot of people didn't."

Solange Knowles made her "Saturday Night Live" musical debut in 2016, when she performed her hit "Don't Touch My Hair." Bill Murray was in attendance, as was TV writer and producer Judnick Mayard. Or at least that's what Mayard alleged in a couple of tweets, in which he claimed to have witnessed Murray display some highly inappropriate behavior toward the little sister of popstar extraordinaire Beyoncé. 

"Your yearly reminder that i saw Bill Murray put both his hands into Solange's scalp after asking her three times if her hair was a wig or not," Mayard wrote in a tweet. After it went viral, Mayard offered some clarification, claiming that Murray immediately (allegedly) insisted on touching her hair after she sang a song titled "Don't Touch My Hair. "She had just finished performing that song on 'SNL' when he did it," he wrote in a follow-up tweet, adding, "that's the audacity of whiteness." While Knowles never did officially confirm nor deny Mayard's nor account, her fans assumed she'd done the former when her X (formerly Twitter) account liked those tweets.

Aziz Ansari is best known for roles in TV series "Parks and Recreation" and Netflix hit "Master of None," but an accusation of sexual misconduct derailed his promising career. In 2022, he was in the midst of a comeback project, directing the feature film "Being Mortal." Based on the book of the same name, the film boasted an A-list cast that included Ansari, Keke Palmer, Seth Rogen, and Bill Murray.

In the midst of filming, a woman accused Murray of inappropriate behavior. The studio immediately suspended production and eventually shut down the whole movie. As Puck reported, Murray insisted that whatever had taken place had been due to miscommunication, and he ultimately paid her a settlement of more than $100,000. In exchange, she agreed not to sue, while also signing a non-disclosure agreement. Murray eventually addressed the incident during an appearance on CNBC. "I did something I thought was funny, and it wasn't taken that way," he said. "The company, the movie studio, wanted to do the right thing, so they wanted to check it all out, investigate it, and so they stopped the production." While Ansari has never publicly commented on the incident, he could not have been happy to see his feature-film directorial debut scuttled because of Murray's bad behavior.

Jay Pharoah was a member of the "Saturday Night Live" cast when he ran into Bill Murray, who was hanging around backstage. "He's not hosting this week, he's just there," Pharoah recalled during an appearance on Shannon Sharpe's "Club Shay Shay" podcast. According to Pharoah, Murray began needling him, which escalated to insults. "He calls me 'fat boy,' then he gets on me, he starts hitting me ... in the same place, over and over again," he said. At a certain point, Pharoah grew so annoyed that he decided to pick Murray up and body-slam him, WWE-style, into a sofa. "Drunk out of his mind, no recollection, probably, of this whatsoever," Pharoah said of how he perceived Murray at that moment. "He was attacking me, and I got him," he later said.

According to Pharoah, his own personal experience with Murray seemed to mirror all the other negative anecdotes that had started to leak out alleging a pattern of bad behavior. "And now all them stories are coming out about Bill Murray," he added during his "Club Shay Shay" appearance. "Yes, you can confirm 'em, that man is, something up with him."