Bill Murray, the comedian who built a career on being unreachable

The story everyone tells about Bill Murray is the one about how impossible it is to get him on a film. There is no agent. There is a number, and you call the number, and you leave a description of the project, and then you wait. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for a polite refusal that arrives by some other route entirely. Sometimes, against every expectation, he simply appears on set with no paperwork signed and starts working. The myth has grown so dense that it threatens to overwhelm the actual work, except for one inconvenient fact: the work is still happening, and most of it is excellent, and almost all of it argues something about American comedy that he is the only person alive who could argue.

The fifth of nine children in an Irish-American Catholic family — his father sold lumber, his mother worked a mailroom — William James Murray was born on a September afternoon in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up a few miles up the lake shore in Wilmette. Loyola Academy and a short pre-medical stint at Regis University in Denver gave him the Jesuit gravity that would later make the deadpan funnier. Chicago’s Second City and Del Close’s improv classroom gave him the technique. By the mid-1970s he was in New York on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, brought in to replace John Belushi when Belushi defected to Saturday Night Live. The pattern of getting in through a side door, of arriving once the official one had closed, started early.

He arrived on Saturday Night Live in its second season — the era after the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, the era widely written off until he and his peers reset it. He left in 1980 already a movie star. Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters: the decade of the 1980s ran on his face, the eyebrow doing more work than most actors’ entire bodies. Then the comedies kept escalating into something stranger. Scrooged. What About Bob? Groundhog Day, the Harold Ramis loop that proved the deadpan was a moral instrument and not a shrug.

Somewhere around Groundhog Day a different career started flickering behind the comedies, and Wes Anderson saw it first. Rushmore in 1998 reset the persona. Anderson’s chalk-line compositions and his interest in melancholy adults gave Murray a register he had been waiting to use. Five years later Sofia Coppola wrote Lost in Translation for him — three Tokyo nights of a man who knows exactly how lonely he is — and the Academy nominated him for Best Actor, the Hollywood Foreign Press gave him the Golden Globe, BAFTA gave him their leading-actor award, and the comedian became, irrefutably, a screen actor of the first rank.

The Anderson collaboration kept extending: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, last year’s The Phoenician Scheme — ten films across twenty-five years. Jim Jarmusch built two films around him. Sofia Coppola made A Very Murray Christmas and then On the Rocks, where his lounge-singer father turned a screwball plot into an essay on charm as a form of damage.

The persona that works in front of a camera does not always work behind it. In April 2022 production of Being Mortal, Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, was suspended after Murray was accused of inappropriate conduct on set. A six-figure private settlement was paid; the film has not resumed. Murray has spoken publicly about what he described as a kiss across face masks, framed at first as a misjudged joke, later acknowledged as something he had to keep thinking about. Scarlett Johansson has spoken about earlier tension on Lost in Translation, and about reconciliation since. The deadpan that turned every awkward room into a punchline was, for a moment, the persona being interrogated, and the work has had to make room for that interrogation.

The work has kept moving anyway. The Friend, opposite Naomi Watts and a Great Dane, arrived in 2025 to the kind of tender reception that suggested the late-Murray register — quiet, attentive, willing to disappear inside a scene — was finding its proper light. The Phoenician Scheme reunited him with Anderson the same year. Andy Garcia’s neo-noir Diamond, fifteen years in the writing, premieres out of competition at Cannes on 19 May 2026 with an ensemble that includes Brendan Fraser and Dustin Hoffman. Max Barbakow’s Epiphany has him opposite Kristen Wiig as an eccentric math savant and billionaire named Oz Bell. The Springs, Howard Franklin’s script under Theodore Melfi’s direction, will have him as a retired detective drawn back in by his brother’s death at a retirement home. Three roles, three different gravities, all of them written for a man who could refuse all of them and was sent the script anyway.

He has been married twice — to Margaret Kelly between 1981 and 1996, to Jennifer Butler from 1997 until their divorce in 2008 — has six sons across those marriages, and is godfather to Wes Anderson’s daughter. Butler died in 2021. He keeps the rest of the perimeter close, and the 1-800 number still works. Sometimes the call is returned, sometimes it isn’t, and either way the next film is already being shot somewhere without explanation. Diamond is at Cannes next week. Epiphany is next. The career that ran on disappearance keeps appearing.

Tags: actors, bill murray, Diamond, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola, The Phoenician Scheme, wes anderson