From The New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm David Marquesi.

In Bill Murray's new movie, The Friend, which is based on a great novel by Sigrid Nunez,

he plays Walter.

Walter's best friends with Iris, played by Naomi Watts.

Through a surprising course of events, Iris winds up having to take in Walter's Great Dane.

And by the way, Iris lives alone in a modest apartment in Manhattan, so not exactly ideal for a dog the size of a small horse, and not exactly nice of Walter.

Like so many of Murray's late career characters, Walter is funny and charismatic,

but he's also kind of a jerk.

He's resentful and self-centered, and he's caused some real damage.

Now, I'm a huge Bill Murray fan, and I sometimes imagine those more recent roles

as kind of like alternate world versions of the comedy characters that made him a superstar.

Because Peter Vankman in Ghostbusters or Phil Connors in Groundhog Day

to pick just two examples, they could be selfish and even cruel,

but in the end, they always get away with it.

Maybe this is a little too much cosmic thinking on my part,

but it's almost as if latter-day Bill Murray characters

are suffering the karmic payback owed to his earlier ones. That tension between being beloved

and leaving damage behind him is something that's come up in Murray's off-screen life, too. Just a few

years ago, in 2022, he was alleged to have behaved inappropriately with a female staff member on the set of the film Being Mortal.

She said that he straddled her and kissed her through masks, which they were both wearing as part of COVID protocols.

The production was shut down, and eventually they reached a settlement.

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