Bill Murray thinks misconduct that shut down Being Mortal is "still funny"

"I don’t go too many days or weeks without thinking about what happened on Being Mortal," Murray noted in a very frank interview with The New York Times.

By William Hughes | April 5, 2025 | 7:02pm

Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Film News Bill Murray

Bill Murray thinks misconduct that shut down Being Mortal is

Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Read our announcement | See the 10 Best Games of 2025 (So Far)

Bill Murray gave an extremely frank interview to The New York Times this week, including a lengthy discussion of the 2022 incident in which he was accused of behaving inappropriately on the set of Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal, which led to the film being permanently shuttered. Speaking to the Times‘ The Daily podcast, Murray unashamedly notes that he still thinks the action he took—which he describes as kissing a woman who worked on the film while both of them were wearing masks due to the COVID-19 pandemic—was “funny,” describing it as an effort to keep spirits high on the set of a very heavy film. (Other reports have stated that Murray also straddled the woman in question, who he ultimately reached a settlement with; in the podcast interview, he doesn’t address that part of the allegations.)

“I don’t go too many days or weeks without thinking about what happened on Being Mortal,” Murray acknowledges, when interviewer David Marchese asks if he sees parallels between his own situation, and that of his character in his latest film, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend. Saying he sees his role on a film set as being one of keeping up morale, and that he was amused at the absurdity of kissing someone through a mask, Murray gives a rundown of the incident from his point of view:

Most Popular

Someone that I worked with, you know, that I had had lunch with on various days of the week and so forth, we were all, it was COVID, we were all wearing masks, and we were all just stranded in this one room, listening to this crazy scene. And I don’t know what prompted me to do it. It’s something that I had done to someone else before, and I thought it was funny. And every time it happened, it was funny. I was wearing a mask, and I gave her a kiss, and she was wearing a mask.

Shortly after the incident, Searchlight Pictures launched an investigation that led to the studio shutting down the production, which Murray is clearly still pretty unhappy about:

It still bothers me because that movie was stopped by the, whatever they call the human rights or HR of the Disney Corporation, which is probably a little bit more strident than some countries. But, and I, you know, it turned out there was like preexisting conditions and all this kind of stuff. I’m like, what? Why was anyone supposed to know anything like that? It was like, and there was to be no conversation, there was no conversation, there was nothing, there was no peacemaking, nothing. And it went to this lunatic arbitration, which I recommend to anyone out there — if anyone ever suggests you go to arbitration, don’t do it. Never, ever do it. Because you think it’s, like, justice. And it isn’t.

Murray acknowledges that “You can teach an old dog new tricks. But I just thought it was a disappointment. It was a great disappointment.” Elsewhere, the actor also addresses the occasional reputation he’s picked up for being a difficult co-worker on sets in general, basically chalking it up to the law of large numbers in terms of how many people he’s met and worked with over the years. (He makes, for instance a distinction between throwing a glass ashtray in Richard Dreyfus’ presence while angry on the set of What About Bob? with actually throwing an ashtray at Dreyfuss, which the actor has long claimed. “If’d thrown it at Dreyfuss… I’d have hit him,” Murray notes, with a sudden note of menace in his voice.) Then he says this, which we’ll leave you with, as it’s one of the more depressing passages we’ve ever heard from a very famous person who we still have a lot of lingering affection for, as Murray describes his day-to-day existence: “What I do for a living is, I take cellphone photographs. I’m not an actor, I am a donkey that’s photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera. That is what I do, all day long.” He puts a positive spin on it, but, y’know: Bleak!

[via The Wrap]