Murray passed up the opportunity to make another ‘service comedy’ with Eastwood after wrapping ‘Stripes’
The actor, who is currently starring in Riff Raff and The Friend, shared on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday, March 25, that his biggest work regret is not making a comedy with Eastwood, 94.
Decades ago Murray was watching Eastwood movies, like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and noticed that all of the sidekicks have great parts; they get great death scenes and get avenged by Eastwood’s character, he said. He was then moved to call Eastwood out of the blue.
“He said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy?’ Because I just made Stripes, and he had this great idea for an enormous Navy thing,” said Murray, 74.
Murray shared that when Eastwood asked, he first worried about getting pigeonholed into a specific type of movie genre.
“Like, geez, would I become like Abbott and Costello and have to do military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess, maybe I shouldn’t.’ ”
He ended up turning down the offer, and has thought about it ever since.
“It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it because it was a big-scale thing. I don’t know if I’d have gotten a great death scene.” Murray confessed. “It was more of a comedy that one. He had access to World War II boats, and he could have, like, made a flotilla and stuff, and there was some cool stuff in it.”
“When I see him, I’m like, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know … but I wish I’d done that Clint, I’m really sorry.’ ” Murray shared that Eastwood is “well over it,” calling the Oscar winner a “very resilient fellow.”
Stern asked Murray if he knew that Stripes was originally written for Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong.
“Turns out that Cheech and Chong’s agent didn’t want them to do it,” Murray revealed. “Cheech and Chong never even saw the script. I think if they’d seen the script, they could have fun with it. There were plenty of crazy, stoner scenes in it. There was a whole scene where we go to South America and we eat some potion and everyone has a psychedelic experience and totally gibberish, you know, yeah, but so that stuff was there in the original script.”