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Bill Murray Regrets Turning Down This Clint Eastwood Movie

“It’s one of the few regrets I have,” the 74-year-old told Howard Stern.

Actor Bill Murray still regrets passing up on the chance to star in a movie with Clint Eastwood. The 74-year-old actor revealed his seemingly deep-seated guilt during an appearance on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday, March 25. The Groundhog Day star was prompted to journey down memory lane when Stern asked him if he ever longed to act in a film he watched. Murray explained how a long time ago, watching Eastwood’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot encouraged him to call the director. “And when he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy,’ like jeez, ‘Would I become like Abbott and Costello?‘” Murray joked. “I had to do like military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess maybe I shouldn’t.‘” The movie turned out to be the 1986 dark comedy Heartbreak Ridge in which Eastwood plays a U.S. Marine assigned to train a group of unruly recruits. “It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it,” Murray told Stern. “Because it was a big-scale thing, and I would have gotten a great—I don’t know if I’d have gotten a great death scene, it was more of a comedy that one—but it was great. He had access to World War II boats and he could have like made a flotilla and stuff, and there was some cool stuff in it.”