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A little over two decades ago, Scarlett Johansson had a difficult time connecting with Bill Murray on the set of 2003’s Lost in Translation. In a new Vanity Fair interview, she says, “He’s such a different person now.”
In the film, Johansson’s character, a lonely young woman, bonds in Tokyo with a pensive movie star played by Murray In the interview published today, Johansson tells Vanity Fair the bond was … acting. “Bill was in a hard place,” she says. “Everybody was on tenterhooks around him, including our director and the full crew, because he was dealing with his … stuff.” While she doesn’t explain what Murray was going through at the time, she instead refers to a “headspace” he was in without going into further detail.
She goes on to share that they reconnected recently at Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special, where he seemed gentler to her. “I think life has humbled him,” she says. When Vanity Fair presses her as to whether or not she was referring to 2022 accusations of misbehavior during the making of a movie called Being Mortal, she says yes. At the time, Searchlight Pictures halted production when Murray, wearing a mask to prevent the spread of Covid, kissed a masked female crew member as a joke, ostensibly without her consent.
“That was really bad,” Johansson says. “But I also know Covid was a hard thing for him. Life — all these things have led up to him being held accountable for that kind of behavior.… But you know what? How wonderful that people can change.”
Murray discussed the allegations in a New York Times interview last month. “I dunno what prompted me to do it,” he said. “It’s something that I had done to someone else before, and I thought it was funny, and every time it happened, it was funny. I was wearing a mask, and I gave her a kiss, and she was wearing a mask. It wasn’t like I touched her, but it was just, I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”
Being Mortal remains incomplete, but Murray said he learned from the experience. “You can teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.
