Is Bill Murray a nice guy? Richard Dreyfuss and Lucy Liu answer that differently than his fans do

Murray, the Saturday Night Live alum behind Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation, has one of the stranger reputations in Hollywood: a movie star famous for showing up uninvited in ordinary people's lives. There's a whole documentary about it, Tommy Avallone's The Bill Murray Stories, which premiered at SXSW in 2018. Murray didn't take part. He's back on screen right now in A Course Called Ireland, a golf travel series on Paramount+ and the BBC.

What fans say

The fan version of Bill Murray is a man who joins in. The documentary and the people in it have collected the stories:

• Karaoke — in 2011, he walked into a group of strangers' private karaoke room in New York and sang duets with them
• Poetry — in 2009, he read poems to construction workers at the Poets House site in Manhattan
• Weddings — in Charleston, South Carolina, he made a couple laugh from across the street, then joined their wedding photos
• Kickball — in New York, he joined a pickup game, and a bystander's response was "Oh sure, you can play"
• Bartending — at SXSW in 2010, he worked the bar at Austin's Shangri-La, then invited the bartender to come see GZA

And in St Andrews, Scotland, he turned up at a student house party, which is where the most famous of the stories begins. Hold that one.

What Richard Dreyfuss says

Dreyfuss co-starred with Murray in What About Bob? in 1991, Frank Oz's comedy about a needy patient who follows his psychiatrist on vacation. Murray was the patient. Oz later called it "a tough, tough movie to shoot."

In 2019, Dreyfuss told Yahoo Entertainment about a dinner when he brought Murray a script change he thought was hilarious. "Bill just got drunk at dinner. He was an Irish drunken bully, is what he was," Dreyfuss said.

"He put his face next to me, nose-to-nose and he screamed at the top of his lungs, 'Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!'" Dreyfuss said.

Then, according to Dreyfuss, Murray threw a glass ashtray at his face from a couple of feet away. "It weighed about three-quarters of a pound. And he missed me. He tried to hit me. I got up and left."

Murray has a different version. "Anything that I could think of to annoy someone in a scene, particularly if it was Dreyfuss, I went with it," he said in an interview in the early '90s. But the ashtray he denies, and in 2025 he told The New York Times exactly how.

"I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling," Murray said. "If I'd thrown it at Dreyfuss, I'd have hit him."

So the official dispute isn't whether something got thrown. It's whether he missed on purpose.

What Lucy Liu says

Liu worked with Murray on Charlie's Angels in 2000, where she played Alex and he played Bosley. The story of their on-set blowup circulated for years, and in 2021, after a production assistant brought it up again on Twitter, Liu told it herself on the Los Angeles Times' Asian Enough podcast.

Don't miss: Bill Murray's Ireland golf series is six episodes long, and the course list isn't the reason to watch

The fight started over a rewritten scene Murray didn't know had changed, and it escalated from there. Liu called his language "inexcusable and unacceptable."

"I would not stand down, and nor should I have," Liu said. "I'm not going to sit there and be attacked."

"There's no need to condescend or to put other people down," she said. The two have run into each other several times at Hollywood events since, and in January 2025 she told The Guardian: "I have nothing against Bill Murray at all."

The most recent chapter

In April 2022, production on Being Mortal, Aziz Ansari's first film as a director, was suspended after a complaint about Murray's behavior on set. Murray addressed it in an interview with CNBC.

"I did something I thought was funny, and it wasn't taken that way," Murray said.

"I think it's a sad dog that can't learn anymore," he added. "I don't want to be that sad dog."

For the record: at that St Andrews house party, after crashing it, Bill Murray stayed and did the dishes.

Previously we wrote: When Harry Met Sally's original ending has no New Year's Eve speech in it at all