Bill Murray’s Insightful AMA Reddit Chat


Bill Murray isn’t someone who makes too many public appearances. While he’s starting to come back after being choosy about his roles, he still remains to be a pretty elusive person. At least as elusive as he can be following his legendary career and stint on Saturday Night Live.

When Murray actually emerges from his iconic roles, and speaks publicly it seems like it’s all for a greater purpose, or at least that’s what it turns into. Murray took the internet by storm the other day by giving a few kernels of wisdom during his Reddit AMA chat with the site’s members. For those who aren’t familiar an AMA chat is one Reddit users have an allotted time to ask any given guest, usually a cultural figure or celebrity, questions on their mind. Questions usually range from questions about the guest’s career or anything under the sun, which is a lot given Reddit’s diverse community.

This format of course opens the floor to ridiculous questions and can result in some amusing answers. However the AMA is only as good as how much the guest interacts with the Reddit members, and in the case of Bill Murray’s Reddit AMA it seemed like it was a good time and made some of his answers made headlines of their own.

Here’s five of the best insights from Bill Murray’s AMA experience:

1. The previous SNL cast was the best since the original.

The last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different. It’s all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don’t get the whole thing figured out, it’s not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors – and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add – they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet.

2. He thought Garfield was a film by the Coen Bros.

“I had a hilarious experience with Garfield. I only read a few pages of it, and I kind of wanted to do a cartoon movie, because I had looked at the screenplay and it said ‘Joel Cohen’ on it. And I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind. ”

3. The iconic Groundhog Day deserved more attention.

The scripts is one of the greatest conceptual scripts I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s a script that was so unique, so original, and yet it got not acclaim. To me it was no question that it was the greatest script of the year. To this day people are talking about it, but they forget no one paid any attention to it at the time. The execution of the script, there were great people in it. It was a difficult movie to shoot because we shot in winter outdoors. If you ever get to go to Puxatawney, you should go, it is one of the few things that is BETTER than advertised. It’s really something to see.

4. He explains why he almost quit acting.

“Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’ So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

5. His support of marijuana is thoughtful.

You’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of,” he said. “You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated.

To check out Bill Murray’s full Reddit AMA chat click here.

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