Geena Davis recalls Bill Murray pulling down her dress strap during ‘awful’ TV interview – but the memory of it was too much to bear
By GEOFF BENNETT,
Former ’80s star and current TV anchor recalls Murray’s reaction to her dressing down over a TV interview
The former co-host of ‘Saturday Night Live’ recalls a traumatic experience with Bill Murray during a memorable interview on the Tonight Show in 1982.
In 1984, Ms Davis played the lead role of a woman in a relationship with Bill’s character in ‘Ghostbusters.’
Davis, who had previously enjoyed a string of TV successes including ‘Beverly Hills 90210’, ‘Baywatch’ and ‘Frasier,’ describes the incident in the programme to the tune of the ‘Ghostbusters’ theme: ‘I’ve been very lucky. I’m very fortunate and I’ve been very blessed. But what that interview is like in my head, I’ve never been able to get that out of my head. I’ve never been able to get that out of my head.’
In the programme, Davis describes a rehearsal of her character’s interview in the dressing room with Murray.
She says that she ‘didn’t know anything about what I was doing’.
‘And so he had to sort of pull down my dress from the back of my outfit… he pulled my dress down, pulled it down and I remember his fingers just brushed against the straps… he had his hand on the straps, but I didn’t know at that time that they were the straps of my dress.’
She says to the tune of the ‘Ghostbusters’ theme: ‘At that moment, I knew I had a friend, I really did have a friend, the man, Bill Murray.’
Ms Davis says that it took a while to get over Murray’s reaction to her performance.
‘It was awful, awful, awful,’ she recalled. ‘But the funny thing is, I remember the next day, the next day, I went to the Tonight Show, to do the show. And in the middle of the show – in a very funny story about a man whose hand just got caught in the TV – Bill Murray comes on, and the whole