Hollywood is a lot more buttoned up and professional on movie sets these days. Major productions now have lawyers and intimacy coordinators and professional stunt teams. They’ve put the infrastructure in place to try to make the experience of making movies as safe and comfortable as possible, but that was not always the case. Even thirty years ago, the biggest stars in the world were getting thrown into the deep end, like, for example, Bill Murray when he was bitten twice by a groundhog.
Whispers of the former SNL star getting his finger chomped on the set of Groundhog Day have been going around for decades, but Murray just readdressed it and told the full story on Hot Ones. They were filming the scene where Murray drives his car with the groundhog when the animal bit down on his finger, tearing right through his glove. The next day when they reshot it, Murray tried to protect himself, and the exact same thing happened again.
He got me back-to-back, two days in a row. The second day I was cheating, or I thought I was being smart, and I put some fisherman’s gloves, like steel gloves on, underneath the gloves I was wearing. His teeth went right through the steel.
As you can imagine, Murray was not a happy camper, especially after the second bite. He said he confronted the animal trainers and did his best “self-righteous actor” to figure out what was going on, but the response wasn’t what he expected. Apparently the groundhog wasn’t trained at all and was just some random groundhog they’d trapped a few weeks ago. Here’s a portion of his quote…
I got upset with the animal wrangler. I said ‘who the hell trained this gopher?’... The two of them, they were like a gal and gal couple, they looked at each other and (said), ‘well, he’s wild… We caught him over that way, over by that field, we caught him there like two weeks ago.’
Can you picture the headlines that would go around social media today? Imagine if Bradley Cooper did a rom-com and suddenly there were stories about him getting attacked by a wild animal in the middle of filming a scene. X would crash from all the people trying to get in snarky comments and share the story. What a news cycle that would be.
Regardless, it’s worth shouting out Groundhog Day for still being relevant enough more than thirty years later for these stories to go around. It’s, of course, cited as the inspiration for so many time loop movies, but it’s also just a great movie that still holds up and is being regularly watched today. It also helps that it’s related to a yearly moment in time.
There’s perhaps no clearer path to long-term pop culture relevance than a beloved piece of art being uniquely associated with a holiday. We love playing seasonal music and watching seasonal movies, and while that’s most common with Christmas, Thanksgiving and the other major holidays, Bill Murray’s classic Groundhog Day proves it works for lesser holidays too.
Murray still has a “nodule” on his hand from where the groundhog bit down. It’s a wild reminder of one of the craziest things to happen to him on set, but it’s probably also a more pleasant reminder of one of his greatest movies. The shoot was difficult and straining for a lot of reasons beyond the groundhog, but it must be touching to know so many people still care about it so many years later.
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