Funnyman Bill Murray regrets lending his voice to animated film Garfield to work with his idol, comedy writer Joel Coen - because he realized too late the part was written by a different Joel Cohen.
The actor admits he jumped at the chance to play the fat cat in the 2004 live-action film, loosely based on the Jim Davis comic strip Garfield - when he thought one half of the Oscar-winning Coen brothers filmmaking duo was attached to the script. However, he didn't realize until it was too late that another writer with a similar name had actually worked on the screenplay - and it wasn't funny.
Murray tells GQ magazine, "I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Cohen.' And I thought: 'Christ, well, I love those Coens!' They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, 'Yeah, I'd like to do that.'"
"Finally I went out to L.A. to record my lines... and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, 'Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with.' So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, 'Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the f**k was Coen thinking? And then they explained it to me: it wasn't written by Joel Coen."