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The Real Reason Richard Dreyfuss Can’t Stand Bill Murray

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Richard Dreyfuss has spent decades making it clear he can’t stand Bill Murray — and he’s never been quiet about why.

The animosity traces back to 1991’s What About Bob?, the Frank Oz comedy that paired Dreyfuss’s uptight psychiatrist Dr. Leo Marvin against Murray’s clingy, boundary-obliterating patient Bob Wiley. On screen, it played as a classic odd-couple comedy. Off screen, the friction was real, and it never fully went away.

• Dreyfuss called the production a “terribly unpleasant experience” in a 2007 A.V. Club interview, stating flatly, “We didn’t get along, Bill Murray and I don’t like him.”
• In an August 2017 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dreyfuss doubled down, branding Murray a “pig” who was impossible to work with — while admitting, “although I loathe him, he makes me laugh.”
• Producer Laura Ziskin has described Murray throwing her into a lake during one on-set argument, and separately breaking her sunglasses and threatening to throw her across a parking lot.

Dreyfuss Offers His Perspective

For Dreyfuss, the problem was never really about jokes landing or not landing — it was about temperament. He’s described the What About Bob? set as genuinely hostile, not the usual actor-hyperbole version of “we didn’t click.” Nearly three decades later, he still hasn’t softened his language, telling the Telegraph in 2017 that Murray was a “pig” to be around on set, even while conceding the man is funny.

“We didn’t get along, Bill Murray and I don’t like him.”

That’s not a passing shot — Dreyfuss has repeated versions of that sentiment across multiple interviews spanning a decade, which is part of what separates this from the usual Hollywood press-tour spat that gets patched up by the next junket. It’s the same story on multiple platforms, over multiple years, without any real walk-back.

Murray Provides His Viewpoint

Murray’s side of it plays almost like a punchline he’s still enjoying. In retrospective interviews, including an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Murray has suggested Dreyfuss took the whole thing — and acting generally — far too seriously, and that his co-star’s uptight energy practically invited torment. Murray’s take was less “we had a falling out” and more “he made it too easy.”

That framing lines up with what anyone who’s watched the movie already senses: Murray’s Bob Wiley is designed to be maximally irritating to Dreyfuss’s buttoned-up Leo Marvin, and by most accounts Murray simply extended that dynamic past “action” and “cut.” Longtime collaborator Dan Aykroyd has a name for the chaos Murray can bring to a set — “The Murricane” — and colleagues who worked with him around that era say the nickname wasn’t an exaggeration.

Tension On Set

The behind-the-scenes strain on What About Bob? wasn’t confined to the two leads. Producer Laura Ziskin has recounted clashes with Murray that escalated well past creative disagreements — including being thrown into a lake during one argument, and, on another occasion, having her sunglasses broken with a threat to throw her across a parking lot. Those anecdotes have circulated for years as evidence that Murray’s unpredictability on that particular shoot wasn’t limited to Dreyfuss.

For readers who enjoy tracking which celebrity relationships curdled from cordial to combative, this fits a familiar pattern covered elsewhere, including stories of celebrities who started out friends and ended up enemies — except in Dreyfuss and Murray’s case, there’s no evidence they were ever friendly to begin with.

Origins Traced To SNL Roots

There’s long been speculation that the bad blood predates What About Bob? entirely, stretching back to Dreyfuss’s guest appearances on Saturday Night Live during Murray’s run on the show in the late 1970s. Whether that history primed the two for conflict once they landed opposite each other on a movie set remains speculation rather than confirmed fact. What’s not speculation is that What About Bob? is the point both men keep returning to whenever they’re asked about each other — it’s the breaking point that cemented the estrangement, not just a chapter in it.

Dreyfuss has never publicly reconciled with Murray, and there’s no indication the two have worked together since 1991. Given how consistently Dreyfuss has restated his position — from 2007 all the way through 2017 — it doesn’t look like a rivalry either man is particularly interested in ending.