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How A Case Of Mistaken Identity Led To Bill Murray’s Most Bizarre Role

By TeeJay Small
| Published

You probably know Bill Murray as one of the greatest comedic minds of the 1980s through the mid 2000s. If you’ve followed his career closely, you’ve seen him put audiences in stitches with performances in Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, Zombieland, and everything in between. Still, every actor makes a few questionable choices in their time, and not every Bill Murray performance is a slam dunk. Fans of the comedic A-lister were shocked, for instance, when Murray agreed to voice the titular orange cat in 2004’s Garfield: The Movie, a role he later revealed he took by mistake after mistaking writer Joel Cohen for Joel Coen.

When this casting news was first announced, fans pontificated on the reason why Bill Murray would agree to lead a highly sanitized PG movie. After all, his other projects around that time include such mature, introspective hits as The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Surprisingly, it turns out that Murray signed on to voice Garfield not for a quick paycheck, not out of love for the original comic strip, but purely by accident, due to this case of mistaken identity.

Not The Coen He Was Looking For

Garfield: The Movie 2004

2004’s Garfield: The Movie was written by a screenwriter named Joel Cohen. Cohen is credited as a writer on such hit films as Toy Story, Cheaper By The Dozen, and Evan Almighty. When Bill Murray saw the name on the screenplay for Garfield: The Movie, he mistook the scribe for the very similarly-named Joel Coen, of the Coen Brothers. The Coens, as you likely already know, have a penchant for writing off-beat comedic films that would be a much better fit for Bill Murray’s off-the-walls personality than Garfield: The Movie.

Bill Murray spoke on this subject over a decade ago during a Reddit AMA session. Responding to a fan who asked if there would ever be a third Garfield film, Murray stated “I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind. So I didn’t really bother to finish the script, I thought ‘he’s great, I’ll do it.’” The comedian claims that he didn’t realize Cohen and Coen were different people until months later, after he started laying down his lines.

A Simple Misunderstanding Extrapolated To Absurdity

Garfield: The Movie 2004

In that very same comment, Bill Murray outlined his process while working on Garfield: The Movie, and spoke as though the experience was complete torture. He adds “It was sort of like Fantastic Mr. Fox without the joy or the fun.” Furthermore, Murray claims that all the live action parts of the film were shot before he laid down any lines, and the Garfield model was composited in as a gray blob. It’s well known that Murray improvised heavily throughout the recording process, but he revealed during his Reddit Q&A that he made numerous attempts to reframe entire scenes by swapping his dialogue with jokes that more closely aligned with his vision, much to the chagrin of Joel Cohen.

In an era of social media, it seems like celebrities are more accessible to the public than ever before. Even still, I’m not sure there’s anything more relatable than a guy taking on a massive months-long job based on a simple miscommunication because he couldn’t be bothered to proofread for a single letter H. To this day, Bill Murray has still never worked with the Coen brothers, but he did complete two Garfield films, which are currently available to stream on Hulu.


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Entertainment

This $10 upgrade transforms your PC — but it’s only on sale until midnight

TL;DR: Upgrade a PC affordably with this Microsoft Windows 11 Pro license, on sale for just $9.97 (reg. $199) through tonight at midnight.


Want to get the feeling of a new computer without having to shell out all the money for one? A new operating system gives your device a whole new feel, and if you’ve got a PC lying around, it could probably use this Microsoft Windows 11 Pro upgrade. If you act fast, you can get it for only $9.97 through tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Windows 11 Pro breathes new life into an old computer, extending its lifespan for less than the cost of your lunch. Unlike older operating systems, this one was made with the modern professional in mind.

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Rest easy knowing Windows 11 Pro is filled with features that can improve your workflow — from an easy-to-use interface that enhances usability to snap layouts, seamless redocking, a more powerful search experience, and improved voice typing.

Take advantage of unique professional tools like Azure AD, Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, and BitLocker device encryption. Then take a break and check out the impressive gaming experience offered by DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics.

Windows 11 Pro includes Copilot, Microsoft’s very own AI-powered assistant, which can assist you with a wide range of tasks. Get some help kickstarting your writing process, summarizing web pages, changing your settings, or even opening your apps.

You can also enjoy improved cybersecurity with Windows 11 Pro, as it adds biometric logins, encrypted authentication, and enhanced antivirus protection.

Get your PC a Microsoft Windows 11 Pro license for only $9.97 tonight through midnight.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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3 AdultFriendFinder red flags — how to avoid scams on AFF

Depending on who you ask, AdultFriendFinder is either the Wild West of hookup sites, an “anything goes” paradise for adult fun, or a total scam replete with bots, fake profiles, and inactive accounts. 

After months of personal testing, I can confidently say which AFF you experience ultimately boils down to how you use the site. If you approach it naively, without a strategy, you’re probably going to have some frustrating experiences. On the other hand, if you exercise a modicum of caution and common sense, you’ll discover a huge, fun, and kink-friendly community.

Here are three red flags to look out for as you use AFF, to help you spot potential scammers and separate the authentic users from the fake profiles.

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Unverified accounts

AdultFriendFinder already offers a fantastic first step in combatting fake profiles that they call ConfirmID. Once you’ve created an account, you can, at any time, upload a clear scan of a government-issued ID card and then, using a webcam, undergo a quick face verification scan to confirm that you are indeed the person identified in the government document. 

This step strikes the perfect balance between not being onerous enough to annoy the average user but still requiring enough effort to deter scammers, who notoriously go after the low-hanging fruit. 

Once you’ve completed the ConfirmID sequence, you’ll be rewarded with a verification badge on your profile, and we strongly recommend that you limit your one-on-one interactions on the site to other verified users. 

Perfect profile photos

Alright, admittedly this one requires some personal judgment, as everyone should strive to upload good, high-quality photos of themselves to dating websites. But if every photo looks like it belongs in a magazine, or if the person in the photo looks a little too good to be true, you should exercise caution.

In the age of generative AI and filters, it’s trivially easy to create a fake photo or series of photos, so you should also be on the lookout for what isn’t in the photos. Are there recognizable local landmarks (clubs, restaurants, well-known parks, or street corners) in the photos, or are they all equally generic?

Over-eager chatters

Ever since chat bots became a thing, dating sites have become plagued with them, and as AI improves more and more, it’s not always easy to know, right away, if the “person” you’re talking to is really human. One dead giveaway, though, is how much they chat and how quickly they reply. 

Real people go off on tangents, employ non sequiturs, and sometimes stumble with awkward questions or comments. Chat bots, on the other hand, are typically always chipper and extremely fast-talking, so much so that a paragraph-long answer can come back to you in seconds. 

They also almost always have an agenda, too, whether that’s directing you to click on a link (“Follow my Instagram profile”) or getting you to divulge some potentially compromising bit of personal information about yourself.

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SNL opens with another Pete Hegseth press conference

Saturday Night Live returned from a brief hiatus Saturday with a cold open depicting a joint press conference between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel, with “Master of None” creator Aziz Ansari playing the latter.

Colin Jost’s Hegseth hit the familiar beats at the podium — performative machismo, military bravado, and repeated jabs at the secretary’s well-documented drinking habits. This time, Hegseth arrived at the mic hauling an oversized pitcher of scotch, which he assured the room was his one for the day. He then fielded questions from the press about the administration’s handling of U.S. strikes on Iran, dismissing each reporter with the particular brand of smug confidence that has become central to Jost’s portrayal of the character.

Ansari’s Patel proved to be the sketch’s standout, arriving to defend his tenure at the FBI and proceeding to do so poorly. The bit’s centerpiece involved Patel simultaneously denying and admitting that he had locked himself out of his work email for 36 hours after forgetting he had changed his password to “kashmeoutside69.”

Funnily enough, Patel was reportedly locked out of his FBI email in real life and believed, at least momentarily, that he was being fired. As the sketch demonstrated, the distance between SNL’s Cold Open and the actual news cycle has rarely felt smaller.

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