Stephen Tobolowsky, the prolific character actor who has starred in everything from Freaky Friday to Memento, says that one of the projects he is most proud of is one that he was really only in for a few minutes. Of course, that project — the 1993 hit Groundhog Day — remains one of the most popular movies of the last 30 years, so it’s not hard to understand why he might be proud of it. Tobolowsky played Ned Ryerson in the movie — a side character who showed up, frustrated lead character Phil (Bill Murray) with his effusive personality, and eventually got punched in the face.
Videos by ComicBook.com
According to Tobolowsky, who was speaking with ComicBook.com in support of his new movie Love Virtually, one of the things that made Groundhog Day special was the risks the filmmakers took once they figured out what they really wanted to do with the movie. That included throwing out and rewriting chunks of the script during production.
“I’m very proud of Groundhog Day…because it wasn’t easy,” Tobolowsky told ComicBook.com. “It was a battle to create the show that it was. After the first week, Harold Ramis got with Danny Rubin, our writer, and he says, ‘What’s the story we’re really telling here?’ Are we goign to have a series of sequences where Bill just has no consequences and acts crazy, like he was doing in all of those movies back then, or are we telling the story about, what is the time of our life, and how do we use it? And Harold Ramis and Danny thought, ‘Number two.’ So they started cutting out scenes right and left that were in the original script, and reshaped it. We were getting new pages every day; it was like guerilla theatre, doing Groundhog Day. And in a way, that either leads to disaster, or leads to something brilliant. In terms of Groundhog Day it led to something just brilliant, what Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin did. And of course, Bill was brilliant, and Andie is just stunning. When you see the movie again, you realize the gift of the film is Andie McDowell. She’s just so magnificent.”
He went on to praise Love Virtually as well, saying that in the time since he filmed his part, the filmmakers did so much post-production work that he really didn’t know what to expect when he saw the finished product, which blew him away.
Here’s the official synopsis for Love Virtually:
In a world where the Metaverse has become widely adopted, four couples go to ridiculous lengths to find true love in a virtual world. Love Virtually is a retro future satirical rom-com for the Metaverse era, blending live action and 3D animation as It explores and exposes the absurd reality of our world and where we are heading, while probing life’s deepest questions such as: How does a celebrity find someone who loves them for their true selves? Is it cheating if it’s in VR? and, Is it cheating if it’s with an AI?
