Generally speaking, Bill Murray does not seem like the kind of man who spends too much time thinking about his regrets. During a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show, though, Murray did say that one of the biggest regrets of his career was not working with Clint Eastwood.
“A long time ago, I was watching the Clint Eastwood movies of the day like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot or whatever the hell the movies he was making then, and I thought his sidekick gets killed and he avenges, but the sidekick gets a great part, a great death scene [and] I was like ‘I got to call this guy,’” he explained after Stern asked him whether there are any roles he wished he’d gotten to play.
Murray said that he did eventually call Eastwood “out of the blue,” and the actor/director asked: “Would you ever want to do another service comedy?”
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Murray had just come off of doing the comedy Stripes, and at the time, he said that he was worried about being typecast. “Would I become like Abbott and Costello I had to do military movies?” he said that he wondered at the time.
Because of that hesitation, he ultimately passed on working with Eastwood. “It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it because it was a big-scale thing,” the actor said. “He had access to World War II boats and he could have made a flotilla — and there was some cool stuff in it.”
Although Murray never named the movie, it was likely 1986’s Heartbreak Ridge, which Eastwood both directed and starred in. The movie is a much more straightforward drama than it might have been had Murray been around.