Bill Murray Defends John Belushi After Bob Woodward’s “Completely Inaccurate” Biography

Glenn Garner
·2-min read

More than 40 years later, Bill Murray has a bone to pick with Bob Woodward over his literary treatment of friend and collaborator John Belushi.

Following Belushi’s death at age 33 in 1982, Murray called out Woodward’s 1984 biography Wired as “completely inaccurate”

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“If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled for me too. I can’t take it,” he said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “You could have two sources and everything like that, but the two sources that he had, if he had them for the Wired book, were so far outside the inner circle that it was criminal, cruel.”

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Murray added, “Belushi made people’s careers possible. Mine would be one of them. There’s a lot of people that slept on John Belushi’s couch. There’s a lot of people that stayed for free at his house until they made it in New York. And I’m one. He died in an unfortunate way, but man, he was still the best stage actor I ever saw.”

On March 5, 1982, Belushi was found dead at his Chateau Marmont bungalow. His cause of death was ruled an overdose of cocaine and heroin.

Murray noted he was approached to participate in the book, but something “smelled funny” and he declined. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It went exactly where I thought it was going. Even worse than I thought it was going. Just the title alone, it was cold,” he said.

After Murray moved to New York City in 1974, Belushi recruited him to The National Lampoon Radio Hour. Two years later, he joined Belushi on Season 2 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (then Saturday Night) following Chevy Chase’s departure.

Murray’s starring role as Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters (1984) was originally written by co-stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis for Belushi before his death.

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