Bill Murray has few regrets during his hectic career, but there was a potential role that he wanted him not to refuse.
The former star of “Saturday Night Live” told Howard Stern that he had missed the opportunity to make a film with Clint Eastwood – perhaps for fear of being typast.
“I watched Clint Eastwood’s films of the day, like” Thunderbolt and Lightfoot “or anything he was doing then, and I thought:` his acolyte is killed, and he appears, but the companion is like a large part, a big scene of death, “he told Stern earlier this week.
Murray had just made the successful comedy of 1981 “Stripes” and decided to call Eastwood and let him know that he was interested.
“I said to myself, I have to call this guy. So I called him unexpectedly, and he said, “Would you never want to do another service comedy? Because I just made “stripes” and he had this great idea for a huge marine thing, “added Murray. “And when he said,” Would you never want to do another service comedy, “like Jeez”, I would I become like Abbott and Costello? I had to do as military films?
A few years later, Eastwood made the war film “Heartbreak Ridge”, in which Eastwood played the marine artillery sergeant Tom Highway.
“This is one of the rare regrets that I have is that I did not do it. Because it was a large scale, and I would have had an excellent-I don’t know if I would have had a big death scene, it was more a comedy, this one-but it was great,” he said. “He had access to boats from the Second World War and he could have wanted to do a flotilla and stuff, and there were nice things in it.”
He continued: “When I see him, I say to myself:” I’m sorry, I would have liked to do this clint, I’m really sorry. “It is certainly well on it.
Stern continued to emphasize that the “stripes” were originally written for Cheech and Chong, but their agent did not want them to do it. “They could have had fun, there were a lot of stoner scenes,” said Murray. With Ivan Reitman Direing and Murray with John Candy, “Stripes” found himself as the fifth highest film of the year at the box office.
