By TeeJay Small | Published
You probably know Bill Murray as one of the greatest comedy minds of the 1980s to mid-2000s. If you’ve followed his career closely, you’ve seen him engage audiences with play Saturday Night Live, The Ghostbusters, Zombielandand everything in between. Still, every actor makes a few questionable decisions in their time, and not every Bill Murray career is a slam dunk. Fans of the A-lister comedy were shocked, for example, when Murray agreed to voice the titular orange cat in 2004. Garfield: It’s a moviea role he later revealed he took by mistake after mistaking writer Joel Cohen for Joel Coen.
When this casting news was first announced, fans pointed out the reason why Bill Murray agreed to lead the very clean PG film. After all, some of his projects from that time included mature, early hits like The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translationagain Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Surprisingly, it turns out that Murray signed on to voice Garfield not for a quick paycheck, not for love of the original comic strip, but by accident, because of this case of mistaken identity.
Not the Coen He was looking for
in 2004 Garfield: The Movie it was written by a screenwriter named Joel Cohen. Cohen is credited as a writer on hit films such as toy Story, Cheap By The Dozenagain Evan Somandla. When Bill Murray saw the name in the screenplay of Garfield: The Moviehe mistreated a writer like Joel Coen of the same name, of the Coen Brothers. The Coens, as you may already know, are interested in writing comedy films that would better suit Bill Murray’s off-the-wall personality Garfield: It’s a movie.
Bill Murray talked about this subject ten years ago during a Reddit AMA session. In response to a fan who asked if there would ever be a third Garfield film, Murray said “I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it said Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers’ films. I think Joel Coen is an amazing comedic genius. So I didn’t really bother finishing the script, I thought ‘great, I’ll do it.’ “The comedian says that he did not notice that he did not notice that Cohen started down after his months, Cohen started down and Cohen after a few months.
Simple Misunderstanding Added to Entry
In that same comment, Bill Murray described his process while working Garfield: It’s a movieand he spoke as if the experience was total torture. He adds, “It was like this The wonderful Mr. Fox without joy or pleasure.” In addition, Murray says that all parts of the film were shot before he laid down any lines, and Garfield’s model was assembled as a gray blob. It is known that Murray improvised a lot during the filming process, but he revealed during his Reddit Q&A that he went to great lengths to re-edit all the scenes by replacing his dialogue with jokes that were more in line with his vision, much to Joel Cohen’s dismay.
In the age of social media, it seems that celebrities are more accessible to the public than ever before. Even now, I’m not sure there’s anything more relatable than a guy who takes on a huge job for months based on a simple miscommunication because he couldn’t be bothered to test one letter H. To this day, Bill Murray has never worked with the Coen brothers, but he completed two Garfield films, which are currently available for streaming on Hulu.
