Bill Murray tried to lower Geena Davis’ dress strap during a promo segment. Photo / Arsenio Hall Productions
Bill Murray tried to lower Geena Davis’ dress strap during a promo segment. Photo / Arsenio Hall Productions
A resurfaced 1990 TV interview with Bill Murray and Geena Davis has thrown new light on Murray’s behaviour with his co-stars.
The clip from The Arsenio Hall Show features Murray and Davis on the couch while promoting their movie, the comedy Quick Change.
Throughout the segment, Murray continuously touches Davis, stroking her arm up and down and breathing closely to her body. He even pulled her dress’s strap down at one point before she intervened and readjusted it.
At one point, she yanked her body away from him, saying “excuse me”.
Bill Murray tried to lower Geena Davis’ dress strap during a promo segment. Photo / Arsenio Hall Productions
Murray was doing all that while Davis recounted part of the now infamous audition story to Hall, and explained to the host: “It was a lot like this actually,” as she gestured to Murray’s antics on stage.
Hall, almost in disbelief, asked: “He touched you a lot in the audition?”
Davis replied: “I swear. The first thing he did was take my shirt out of my pants and started tickling my stomach.”
Davis wrote of the horrific audition in her memoirs, Dying of Politeness: A Memoir. She recalled being summoned to a hotel room for the audition where Murray used a massage device on her.
Davis said she said “no” many times but Murray wouldn’t “relent”.
“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,” she wrote. “The other men in the room did nothing to make it stop. I realised with profound sadness that I didn’t yet have the ability to withstand his onslaught – or to simply walk out.”
The contemporaneous footage of Davis playing nice with Murray during the promotional tour and trying to make light of his behaviour only highlights the pressure on actors to not speak out against their colleagues, or “cause a fuss”.
In an interview with UK publication i news, Davis was asked about the 1990 clip.
“Oh, you saw? Isn’t it stunning? It’s awful,” she said. “I forgot that. Telling it that way, just as a humorous anecdote, I must have thought, ‘Well, it’s ultimately funny or makes a good story’ when in fact it was so devastating.”
Murray has been besieged by allegations of inappropriate behaviour, dating back decades.
The star of Ghostbusters, Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation has a well-known reputation for sometimes being difficult to work with.
Drew Barrymore, Bill Murray, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz in Charlie's Angels. Photo / Columbia Pictures, File
Over the years, stories of his less-than-collegial manners have been revealed, including a particularly bruising episode with Lucy Liu on the set of Charlie’s Angels.
Liu recalled a scene that had been reworked while Murray was absent, noting that she had very little input in the creative decisions.
“As we’re doing the scene, Bill starts to hurl insults, and I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on. I was like, ‘wow, he seems like he’s looking straight at me’.
“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. Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I was not going to just sit there and take it.”
Murray has left a trail of hurt colleagues in his wake, including screen legend Anjelica Huston, who revealed Murray had not invited her to a dinner party, to which everyone else in the cast was invited, during the filming of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Seth Green recently recounted when he was a child actor of 9, Murray took offence at Green sitting on the arm of “his” couch in the green room of Saturday Night Live. Murray apparently picked up Green by the ankles and dropped him in a garbage bin.
Green said: “He was like ‘trash goes in the trash can’. And I was screaming, and I swung my arms wildly, full contact with his balls. He dropped me in the trash can, the trash can falls over. I was horrified. I ran away, hid under the table in my dressing room and just cried.
“I do feel like it’s important to say, I love Bill Murray’s work, and I consider him one of the most important cultural icons that we have. But when I was 9 years old, he was very rude.”
Murray’s behaviour is back in the headlines after filming on his latest project, Being Mortal, was suspended earlier this year after a complaint was filed by a cast or crew member.
It emerged this month that Murray settled the claim with a US$100,000 payout to the staffer. According to news site Puck, Murray allegedly “kissed” and “straddled” the woman who was “horrified”.
Murray originally defended the actions as a difference of opinion. He said earlier this year: “I did something I thought was funny and it wasn’t taken that way.”
Being Mortal, written and directed by Aziz Ansari and also starring Keke Palmer, has not resumed production.
