Bill Murray reveals his planned Oscar speech to Charlie Rose
Bill Murray talked to Charlie Rose for the full hour of Rose’s PBS program this week. Like most interviews with the great Murray, it was full of great, candid insight and this time, Rose even got Murray to reveal what he was planning to say for his Oscar acceptance speech.
You may recall Murray received his first and only Oscar nomination in 2004 for playing the lead opposite Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” However, he lost out to Sean Penn, who starred in “Mystic River.”
When asked about the loss, Murray admitted he was surprised.
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Though we may have been robbed of Murray’s potentially great acceptance speech that night, he did share a bit of what he planned to say with Rose.
“I was going to say, ‘When I heard I’d been nominated with,’ you know I’d name these other people, ‘I really thought I had a pretty good chance.’”
He continued, “I just thought no one had ever given that speech... It was great, I didn’t have agents, I didn’t have managers, I didn’t have any of that stuff. So I wouldn’t have to give that ordinary speech of thanking everyone. I’d just go out there and entertain. I always figure, if you’re on a TV show where there’s a billion people? Show up and do something, OK?... Give those folks in Bombay something to talk about.”
But in the end, it may be that Murray’s loss was cinema’s gradual gain. As he explained, “I found about six months later, I realized I’d come down with something. That prize-winning stuff. I’d sort of had a low-grade infection of liking winning the prize and wanting to win the prize. I thought, oh good. You’ve seen when people do win the prize, and then for the next couple of years they really struggle. Because they’re sort of stuck, ‘Hey I’m an Academy Award winner. And now what do I want to do?’... They get all messed up. And that could have happened to me.”
The full interview can be seen here:
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