Lucy Liu does not regret her confrontation with Bill Murray on the set of Charlie’s Angels, saying the language the actor used was “inexcusable.”
The pair starred opposite each other on the 2000 hit Charlie’s Angels, with Lucy playing Alex Munday and Bill playing Bosley alongside a cast including Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore.
However, Bill did not return for the sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, with Bernie Mac stepping in as Bosley’s adopted brother, and his exit was believed to have stemmed from arguments with the director McG and a spat with Lucy.
At the time, it was claimed the Groundhog Day star told Lucy that she couldn’t act, sparking a physical altercation between the two on set.
The 52-year-old shared her side of the story on the Los Angeles Times‘ Asian Enough podcast. “I feel like some of those stories are private,” she first spilled. “But I will say, when we started to rehearse this scene, which was all of us in the agency, we had taken the weekend to rework that particular scene and Bill Murray was not able to come because he had to attend some family gathering.”
“So it was everyone else, and we just made the scene more fluid,” the actress further recalled. “I wish I had more to do with it but I didn’t, because I was the last one cast and I probably had the least amount of privilege in terms of creatively participating at that time.”
Lucy then explained that Bill started hurling “insults” while she and her other co-stars were doing the scene. “I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on,” she continued recounting. “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? 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,” she pointed out. The Elementary alum then decided to stand up for herself after Billy grumbled with “inexcusable and unacceptable” language.
“I was not going to just sit there and take it. So, yes, I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it,” she stressed. “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. And I would not stand down, and nor should I have and nor did I.”
Despite the altercation, Lucy made it clear that she has “nothing against Bill Murray at all.” She went on to note, “I’ve seen him since then at a [Saturday Night Live] reunion, and he came up to me and was perfectly nice. But I’m not going to sit there and be attacked.”
While the actress only addressed the incident this week, Murray broached the subject in an interview with The Times of London in 2009.
“Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me…” he told the outlet. “When our relationship is professional, and you’re not getting that done, forget it.”
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