Charlie’s Angels Star Drew Barrymore Speaks Out on On-Set Fight Between Bill Murray and Lucy Liu

Charlie’s Angels has seen many iterations over the years starting with the television series that debuted in 1976 and ran for five seasons. In 2000, the show was rebooted into a lovable movie directed by McG and starring Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu with Bill Murray playing Bosley. There have been many rumors from the films set about Liu and Murray not getting along, which Liu spoke about earlier this year. In a recent episode of her talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show, Barrymore shed more light on the situation while talking with Danny Pellegrino.

“So what really happened was Bill was just in a – you know comedians can be a little dark sometimes – and he just came in in a bad mood and what you have to know is how much Lucy stood up for herself, and that was the great thing that came out of an unfortunate circumstance,” Barrymore explained.  “She literally said, ‘I do not accept that kind of behavior from you.’ And we all supported her and backed her up, and we moved forward.”

Barrymore added, “In the workplace it is so important that we respect each other, and if you don’t feel you are being respected, to speak up for yourself and to have people around you say, ‘I back this person’ … I respected her then; I respect her now. I am proud of us as a team and a company that we didn’t tiptoe on the eggshells. We dealt with it right then and there, we were strong, and we moved forward, and we didn’t accept anything less moving forward.”

“I feel like some of those stories are private,” Liu previously told The Los Angeles Times‘ Asian Enough podcast. “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. 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.”

Liu continued, “We’re doing the scene, Bill starts to sort of hurl insults, and I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on. 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.”

“Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and 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 added. “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.”

The Drew Barrymore Show airs weekdays on CBS.