Aziz Ansari Still Wants to Finish His Cursed Bill Murray Movie — With Bill Murray
The upcoming comedy Good Fortune stars Aziz Ansari and Seth Rogen as friends who magically exchange lives. It also features Keke Palmer and Keanu Reeves, who plays an angel with It’s A Wonderful Life-esque powers. It’s technically Ansari’s feature directorial debut, if we don’t count Being Mortal, the movie that was scrapped due to Bill Murray’s “inappropriate behavior.”
Being Mortal was similarly going to star Ansari, Rogen and Palmer, but it was famously canceled in 2022 after Murray kissed and straddled a female production staffer without her consent. The woman was “horrified” and filed a complaint. Murray later said he felt “barbecued” by the allegations, arguing that he did nothing wrong because… he was wearing COVID safety gear? “It wasn’t like I touched her,” Murray argued. “I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”
Murray’s lame excuse was one of the few official comments on the matter, as Ansari was largely silent about the scandal. But now, just ahead of Good Fortune’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Ansari has addressed the Murray debacle, and was surprisingly defensive about the famously dickish collaborator.
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Apparently, around three-quarters of the movie had been completed when the studio pulled the plug. “He was devastated,” Ansari said of Murray during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “He couldn’t believe it happened. I think this movie meant a lot to him.” And, according to the outlet, Ansari “still holds out hope” that he’ll be able to “complete his vision — with Murray intact.”
Yup, despite the fact that Ansari already made a movie starring the other leads from Being Mortal, he still wants to revive this obviously cursed project. And, weirdly, he’s totally fine with hiring Murray back, and seemingly is framing him as the "devastated" victim in this scenario.
Sure, he already shot the majority of the movie with Murray — and presumably there’s no room in the budget to replace the Groundhog Day star with, say, a CGI Christopher Plummer — but it’s a little disappointing that he would happily hire back the guy whose bad behavior torpedoed the entire project in the first place.
Like, if Aziz Ansari was the manager of an Arby’s, and one of his employees randomly groped another worker, prompting an investigation that ultimately led to the closure of said Arby’s, would he be right to hire back that same creep years later to work with another crew of Arby’s employees?
Ansari also addressed the 2018 accusation levied against him by a woman who said that her date with the comedian turned into “the worst night of my life” after she felt “pressured” into sex. He noted that, while he didn’t apologize to his accuser on stage during his subsequent stand-up special, he did do so privately. “I mean, I apologized to the person personally, right? When it happened.”
Come to think of it, working with Murray again would be an especially baffling move considering that there was a whole plot line in Master of None about how Ansari’s character, Dev, opts to stop working with a celebrity chef played by Bobby Cannavale because he sexually harasses women. But I guess that was just a TV show.
