Does Bill Murray Play Piano?
Bill Murray is a multitalented actor, having displayed impressive feats of bowling and golfing prowess on the silver screen. In addition to his other skills, we have seen Murray apparently playing the piano onscreen but is he a real pianist?
Bill Murray does not play the piano regularly. However, he did learn to play just enough to appear passable in his “Groundhog Day” piano scene. Close-ups in the scene were performed by a double but Murray did play at least perform some of the music in the scene.
For more about Bill Murray‘s efforts to play the piano in “Groundhog Day” and some onscreen displays of his other talents, keep reading.
Groundhog Day
The history of cinema features countless examples of actors needing to play an instrument onscreen as part of their performance.
While there are extremely impressive cases such as Ryan Gosling’s piano playing in “La La Land” or Joaquin Phoenix stepping into Johnny Cash’s shoes in “Walk the Line”, there are also cases where actors have to get by with the bare minimum of ability.
There are also plenty of instances of actors not even attempting to learn and very obviously miming their playing in ways that might not be obvious to the layman but probably send musicians into hysterics.
For “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray falls somewhere in the middle. While it’s unlikely that he’ll be doing a Bradley Cooper and playing in front of a crowd any time soon, he did make the effort to at least appear competent for his role.
In the movie, his character, Phil, is trapped in a 24-hour cycle, reliving the same day over and over. He decides to make the most of this by learning the piano in order to impress his love interest, Rita.
Fortunately, this story doesn’t demand the sort of musical precision that would be required if Murray were starring in a Beethoven or Mozart biopic.
For the big piano scene, Murray needed to learn a piece of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” to enough of a degree that he would appear to believably play the music during wide shots.
The actor immediately faced a major obstacle due to the fact that he doesn’t know how to read music, not a big problem while learning guitar but a huge issue for the piano.
Instead, he learned to play the piece purely by listening and with muscle memory, practicing the song until he could play it well enough to play onscreen.
A double performed any closeup shots of Phil’s hands while he played the guitar, sparing Murray’s playing from closer examination.
So does Bill Murray play the piano? No, but he did play it for one scene in “Groundhog Day”
The Talented Mr. Murray
While Bill Murray might not be much of a pianist, he has displayed some of his other talents on the big screen.
He is a keen golfer and has been the face of the Pebble Beach Pro-Am for years, helping boost the competition’s profile and also occasionally drawing the ire of golf traditionalists.
His ability to drive a ball down the fairway was on full display for the audience briefly in “Lost in Translation”, where we briefly see him golfing alone during his stay in Japan.
Probably Murray’s most famous feat came during the shooting of “Kingpin”, where his character Ernie McCracken bowls three strikes in a row. While the magic of editing would have made it easy to fake this achievement, Murray went above and beyond by actually bowling a “turkey” for the shoot.
This was a strong contrast to Woody Harrelson, whose bowling ability was apparently far from that of his character, Roy Munson.
So, it seems Bill Murray has plenty of other skills in addition to being a great actor, with some of his onscreen feats serving as a permanent reminder.
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