One of DGMania's favorites, Bill Murray carries a unique quality that makes him quite unlike any other actor. Instead of becoming his role in some method-acting Stanislavski-esque way, and rather than simply hamming it up as himself (as so many of the comedic performers, particularly of his generation, did- Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin), Bill Murray has a knack for swallowing up his characters and turning them into himself. In other words, he reverses the typical acting approach: instead of trying to make himself invisible and allowing the character to come through, Mr. Murray keeps himself deliberately visible and allows the character to develop through different facets of his own personality.
This has made Bill Murray, in our opinion, one of the most versatile, singular, and talented actors of our time. And one of the most underrated. His dramatic performances in Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers are heartbreaking and subtle. Hardly what you'd expect from the same person who reverberates with barely-contained and totally unabated energy in each frame of What About Bob? or who oozes a charming smirk-iness and pompousness in Groundhog Day.
A perfect example of Bill Murray being Bill Murray before we close this assessment for the day: Watch him in Ghostbusters, spinning incredibly poorly written and cheesy lines into gold. How does he do this? By, as Bill Murray, recognizing how ludicrous the lines are, having an awareness of the motion picture he is in, and letting his role come through with that awareness. And the only reason he did the role, fascinatingly enough, was so that the studio would finance his adaptation of The Razor's Edge, a freaking Somerset Maugham novel. So the next time you watch Ghostbusters, realize that the whole time he was thinking about The Razor's Edge instead, and that he actually used that to make his performance better.
**Do you love Bill Murray as much as we do? Are you a douche who hates him? Do you urgently need a Meatballs drinking game? Comment below and let us know!**
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