Bill Murray Says Ghostbusters 2 Cast Signed on "Under False Pretenses"

Film fans have long known that the time that comedian Bill Murray had on 1989's Ghostbusters 2 wasn't what he would call a fun time, and seemingly ended up becoming the reason that he never agreed to return for a third movie. As we know the Ghostbusters franchise was rebooted in 2016 with filmmaker Paul Feig and a sequel to the original two movies is scheduled to arrive later this year. Murray appeared in both of those films however, and in a new interview spoke very candidly about how he and the other cast members got signed on to the original sequel, saying they were all tricked in a way.

"(Ghostbusters 2) ended up not being the story they wrote," Murray said at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in an extended talk with film critic Leonard Maltin after accepting the the Maltin Modern Master Award (H/T Collider). "They got us in the sequel under false pretenses. Harold had this great idea, but by the time we got to shooting it, I showed up on set and went, 'What the hell is this? What is this thing?' But we were already shooting it, so we had to figure out how to make it work. That was a great bunch of people. Just to be together was great.

He continued, "I probably like the first one better than the second one, just because the first cut is the deepest. We were in New York and we really made a mess in New York for a couple of months, but we had a lot of fun. People in New York will accept things, but those uniforms, when we rolled into places, people thought, 'They've got these cool uniforms. They must be somebody.' People thought we were legitimate. When we drove that car through red lights and one-way streets, it just looked like we were in charge of the situation. It was a lot of fun, that first one. We didn't get away with that much on the second one."

Murray also reflected on his time working on Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016) adding " I was just happy to be a fly on the wall," and noted that his time on the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife "was physically painful" because he had to put on his proton pack once again. In the end he noted that the movie "will be worth seeing" when it's released later this year.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife will debut in theaters on on November 11th.