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Lucy Liu details clash with Bill Murray on ‘Charlie’s Angels’ Set: “I Stood Up For Myself, And I Don’t Regret It”
Lucy Liu has spoken up about an on-set brawl she had with Bill Murray while working on “Charlie’s Angels” in 2000.
The actress addressed her thoughts on the subject for the first time on an episode of the Los Angeles Times podcast Asian Enough, presented by Johana Bhuiyan, Tracy Brown, Suhauna Hussain, and Jen Yamato.
She recalls the group beginning to practice a certain scene that took place in the agency. Murray was unable to attend because he had to attend “some family gathering,” she said, and the cast had used the weekend to redo the sequence.
“So it was everyone else, and we just made the scene more fluid,” she shared, noting that she “had the least amount of privilege in terms of creatively participating at that time.”
While Liu did not say what Murray said to her at a later rehearsal, she did reveal that after learning of the rewrites, the actor began “to sort of hurl insults” at her.
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She said, “As we’re doing the scene, Bill starts to sort of hurl insults, and I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on. I was, like, ‘Wow, he seems like he’s looking straight at me.'”
“I couldn’t believe that (the comments) could be towards me, because what do I have to do with anything majorly important at that time? I literally do the look around my shoulder thing, like, ‘Who is he talking to behind me?’ ” Liu said.
“I say, ‘I’m so sorry. Are you talking to me?’ And clearly he was, because then it started to become a one-on-one communication.”
Murray’s behavior was “inexcusable and unacceptable,” according to the actress, who stated she stood up for herself.
“Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down,” she said. “And I would not stand down, and nor should I have and nor did I.”
Liu later added, “I’m not going to sit there and be attacked… I don’t want to be that person that is not going to speak up for myself and stand by the only thing that I have, which is my dignity and self-respect.””
The actress then addressed the media coverage that followed the event, claiming that it was sexist.
“What came out in the press was that I was this and I was that. It was incredible to me how it was turned around, and they automatically thought that the woman was the difficult one,” she recalled. “But I didn’t understand how it got flipped when I had nothing to do with instigating it, or creating that platform of confrontation or anxiety.”
Former crewmembers would tell Liu years later how “grateful” they were that she did what she did. Despite the incident, Liu stated that she has “nothing against” the actor, and the two have subsequently met during a Saturday Night Live reunion. She remarked, “He came up to me and was perfectly nice.”
Murray addressed the rumor in 2009, saying, “Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me. … When our relationship is professional, and you’re not getting that done, forget it.”