“To me it’s still funny, the idea that you could give someone a kiss with a mask on. It’s still stupid. It’s all it was”
Bill Murray reflects on a career-altering moment that still leaves him baffled and bruised.
Legendary actor Bill Murray says what got him canceled wasn’t touching, but trying to be funny. A masked kiss, delivered on a tense film set in 2022, led to Being Mortal being scrapped entirely – and to a financial settlement with the woman who filed the complaint.
“It wasn’t like I touched her,” Murray told the New York Times. “I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”
Bill Murray points finger at Disney
The 74-year-old said they’d had lunch together on several occasions and described the act as something he’d done before, always thinking it was “funny.”
The reaction this time was different. The production was suspended, then shut down. “I ended up being, to my mind, barbecued,” he said, blaming Disney’s Searchlight Pictures for what he called a lack of communication or mediation.
“There was no peacemaking, nothing,” he said. “It still bothers me.”
Murray said he now spends more time posing for fan photos than acting. “I am a donkey that is photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera,” he said. Still, the one thing he keeps returning to is that moment on set: “To me it’s still funny, the idea that you could give someone a kiss with a mask on. It’s still stupid. It’s all it was.”
Read the recent full Bill Murray interview with the NYT.
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