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Why Bill Murray Quit Acting After ‘Ghostbusters’

The comedian took a four-year break following the film’s 1984 release

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Bill Murray made a baffling decision after the success of Ghostbusters shot him to the top of Hollywood’s A-list in 1984: He stepped away from acting. Instead of embracing his newfound celebrity status, Murray took a four-year break and even spent time at Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied history and philosophy. It may seem like a crazy thing to do under the circumstances, but it made perfect sense to him at the time.

One of the reasons Murray opted to avoid the limelight was the film’s overwhelming public response. Suddenly, wherever he went, he found himself getting mobbed. “They scream your name like they’re being raped or killed,” he said of his fans back then. “Things got really weird.” Murray was no longer able to dine out, go shopping, or so much as walk down the street without incident. And growing out his hair and beard to avoid being recognized didn’t make a difference.

When Murray went to Wisconsin with Dan Aykroyd to visit some of his relatives that year, word quickly got around that two of the stars of Ghostbusters were in town. “We’d go out to some bar one night and the next night it would be packed with thousands of people,” Murray recalled. “After a few days I’d lie awake in bed in the middle of the night, and it was like there were carloads of people out there, driving out in the dark looking for me.”

Another factor in his going on hiatus was the failure of a movie that came out a few months after Ghostbusters: the historical drama The Razor’s Edge, in which Murray plays a World War I vet who joins a Buddhist monastery. Murray poured his heart into making the film and had such a great experience working on it that he had a hard time getting into the groove when Ghostbusters went into production afterward. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Ten days ago I was up there working with the high lamas in a gompa, and here I am removing ghosts from drugstores and painting slime on my body,’” he told Rolling Stone prior to the movie’s release. 

At a press junket for The Razor’s Edge in October 1984, Murray was quoted as saying, “I’ll probably jump off the ledge if it doesn’t open big.” When the film ended up bombing, he took off for France, where he stayed with his family for six months. Although he agreed to make a cameo in the 1986 version of The Little Shop of Horrors, he wouldn’t play a substantial role in a movie again until he did Scrooged in 1988. “I’m famous enough,” he said during his time off. “Being more famous isn’t going to do anything but cause me more problems.”

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