Bill Murray played Bosley in 2000’s Charlie’s Angels but was replaced by Bernie Mac for the sequel, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, after supposedly not getting along with co-star Lucy Liu. There’s been years of rumors about the animosity between the two, including a production assistant on the original movie claiming that Liu called Murray a “f*cking c*cksucker” after he rewrote a bunch of scenes without telling anyone,” but the actress set the record straight on the “Asian Enough” podcast.
Liu didn’t want to “get into the specifics,” but she recalled that “when we started to rehearse this scene, which was all of us in the agency, we had taken the weekend to rework that particular scene and Bill Murray was not able to come because he had to attend some family gathering. So it was everyone else, and we just made the scene more fluid. I wish I had more to do with it but I didn’t, because I was the last one cast and I probably had the least amount of privilege in terms of creatively participating at that time.” During the scene, “Bill starts to sort of hurl insults,” the then-Ally McBeal star said, and “it kept going on and on. I was, like, ‘Wow, he seems like he’s looking straight at me.’ I couldn’t believe that it could be towards me, because what do I have to do with anything majorly important at that time?” This is not the first time that one of Murray’s co-stars has described him as being difficult to work with, or even a “bully.”
Liu continued:
“I literally do the look around my shoulder thing, like, who is he talking to behind me? I say, ‘I’m so sorry. Are you talking to me?’ And clearly he was, because then it started to become a one-on-one communication. Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I was not going to just sit there and take it. So, yes, I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it. Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down. And I would not stand down, and nor should I have.”
Liu, who will soon appear in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, clarified that she has “nothing against Bill Murray,” and he was “perfectly nice” when they saw each other again during an SNL reunion, but “I’m not going to sit there and be attacked.”
You can listen to the podcast below.
On our #AsianEnough podcast, she discusses some of the challenges of navigating a career and “moving the needle” for AAPI representation while mainstream American culture continues to otherize and sexualize Asian women.
Have a listen: https://t.co/WpsRQwe85p pic.twitter.com/vZwb7W5xgA
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 27, 2021
(Via ET Canada)