While many fans may have laughed so hard they cried during “SNL50,” former cast member Bill Murray was brought to tears for a whole different reason.
The funnyman, who appeared during the late-night show’s 50th anniversary special last month, says he was feeling all the feels during the show.
“It was surprisingly emotional,” he said Feb. 28 on SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning.” “I wept three times in the show. Yeah, it really got to me.”
Murray, who appeared on the special in a segment in which he ranked “Weekend Update” anchors, then joked he wept because “there were sketches that were dying.” He then buttoned up to say he was affected by the images of people he worked with on “SNL” who have since died, including a montage celebrating the show’s physical comedy that featured a clip of the “Dancing in the Dark” sketch from Season Three in 1978 in which the late Gilda Radner dances with Steve Martin.
“I was watching, and obviously there’s a lot of video and history that they’re showing, and I didn’t see it coming, but there was Gilda up there dancing with Steve Martin and I remember being there watching them rehearse that dance number for days and days and days and days,” he said.
“And I love Gilda. I was crazy about Gilda, and I sort of came apart. I was sitting there in the dressing room with a bunch of people, I couldn’t stop it.”
Murray was also moved at seeing “SNL50” showing “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a black-and-white short film made by Tom Schiller from Season Three in 1978 that featured John Belushi, in makeup to appear old, reading tombstones of other cast members while he pondered why he outlived them all.
Belushi would become the first cast member to die, when he passed away from a drug overdose in 1982 at the age of 33.
“To see that, and to see him — see, I could go now, just thinking about it — to see that sort of foreshadowing that Schiller sort of intuited, to make that, and to miss him,” Murray said before elaborating on the impact Belushi had on others.
“John was a guy who really made a lot of careers possible,” he said. “He dragged all of us out from Chicago. John Belushi did that. He was the first to come out, and he was a bold guy.