It's hard to imagine Bill Murray ever getting too emotional. His whole shtick is deadpanned sarcasm, snarky and even a little mean with a flat affect. Even his displays of despondent depression can oftentimes seem like dissociation or plain disinterest. The best you might get is when he occasionally cracks a smile. However, when it comes to his stomping grounds on Saturday Night Live, Murray's heart softens significantly. Apparently, when the big SNL 50 special came around, Bill was brought to tears for the celebration.
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Recently, Murray appeared on the hit radio show Sway in the Morning to promote his latest film Riff Raff. There, he covers a myriad of topics but one in particular sees him talk about the recent 50 year special for Saturday Night Live. What's eye opening is that Bill sheds all the coolness and admits that such a special night left him in tears. "It was surprisingly emotional," he recalls. "I wept three times in the show. It really got to me."
Bill Murray Weeps During The Massive SNL 50 Special
So what made Murray crack? It's the history that NBC and Saturday Night Live highlighted that evening that left the Ghostbusters star start weeping. Particularly, he notes one clip with Steve Martin and the late Gilda Radner that really cut through to his heart. "I was watching, and obviously there's a lot of video and history that they're showing, and I didn't see it coming, but there was Gilda up there dancing with Steve Martin," Bill recalls.
"I remember being there watching them rehearse that dance number for days and days and days and days," Bill Murray continues. "I was crazy about Gilda, and I sort of came apart. I was sitting there in the dressing room with a bunch of people and I couldn't stop it."
Similarly, a clip with John Belushi also left Murray a crying mess. "There's the film that Tom Schiller made with Belushi visiting the Saturday Night Live graveyard and seeing all his compatriots dead. Meanwhile, John was the first to go," Bill notes. "So to see that, and to see him — see, I could go [cry] now, just thinking about it — to see that sort of foreshadowing that Schiller sort of intuited to make that, and to miss him."
