What happened with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray? Fight revisited as Community star calls out SNL over 50th anniversary exclusion

Veteran actor, comedian, and writer Chevy Chase has broken his silence on being excluded from SNL50: The Anniversary Special in February this year, which marked the NBC sketch comedy show’s five-decade run.

In his upcoming documentary, I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the original Saturday Night Live cast member candidly noted:

“Well, it was kind of upsetting, actually. This is probably the first time I'm saying it. But I expected that I would've been on the stage too with all the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn't. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”

Chevy Chase, 82, continued by referring to his famous Weekend Update segment and asked:

“Why was Bill Murray there, and why was I not? I don't have an answer for that.”

It is noteworthy that Chase and Murray have had a rough history. In February 1978, the duo fought backstage on the SNL sets before going live. This happened when Chevy, who previously quit for a better gig, returned as a guest host, creating tension on the sets and leading new cast member Bill to lose his composure and throw punches at the former.

However, they seemingly buried the hatchet when they appeared together on Harold Ramis’ 1980 sports comedy film Caddyshack.

In his CNN Films’ documentary that will premiere on January 1, Chevy Chase also mentioned reaching out to SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels via text and bringing up his exclusion from the 50th anniversary special. However, he later took it back and called it “silly.”

“But it's not that silly. Somebody's made a bad mistake there. I don't know who it was, but somebody made a mistake. They should've had me on that stage. It hurt,” Chase added.

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Exploring further Chevy Chase and Bill Murray’s infamous feud

Chevy Chase is one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live, who joined during the show’s October 1975 debut. He later became an overnight sensation as the first host of the Weekend Update news satire segment.

In fact, he became known for his iconic signing-off phrase:

“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not!”

Chase was part of SNL until half of its second season in 1976 before leaving to pursue an acting career.

Fellow cast member Jane Curtin replaced him as the anchor of Weekend Update. Meanwhile, Bill Murray, now aged 74, joined the show in its third season and earned the unofficial nickname “the new Chevy,” which reportedly didn’t sit well with him.

On February 18, 1978, Chevy Chase returned to host the 11th episode of season 3. According to the book Saturday Night by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, things went sideways when Chase met Lorne Michaels in his office and assumed he would be hosting Weekend Update all by himself. Not only that, he reportedly referred to Curtin and stated:

“Jane, let's face it, you can't be on the screen with me at the same time.”

Chevy later admitted it was “egocentric” of him to assume this in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ book Live From New York.

But Chevy Chase’s apparent dismissal of Jane Curtin offended Bill Murray, who was close to Curtin. Fellow cast member John Belushi had also reportedly sown seeds of hatred in Murray and turned him against Chase.

For a week before the show, Bill and Chevy threw jabs at one another during practice. Some of these were personal, where Murray commented about Chase’s marriage, while the latter responded with a comment about Bill’s looks, including his facial scars.

On the night when the show was about to go live, and Chevy Chase was supposed to open with a sketch as President Gerald Ford, he reportedly went to Bill Murray’s dressing room uninvited, where the previous verbal exchange turned physical.

According to the above-mentioned books, the duo tried to hit each other and were screaming in the hallway, backstage. While the fight didn’t end up giving either any serious injury, John Belushi’s involvement might have landed him a few punches.

Filmmaker John Landis, who was on the SNL sets at the time, later recounted the incident in Live From New York. He said Murray called Chase a “medium talent,” adding:

“Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and [writers] Michael O'Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny [Aykroyd] jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows.”

Meanwhile, Chevy Chase recalled that he “weathered” the altercation as he was a professional and had a “show to do.”

“Others might have withered. I had a certain tensile strength about me from childhood with an older brother who had already kicked the crap out of me through much of my younger life, and there'd been a number of times when I was in violent situations, so it wasn't as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks. I had,” he added.

Chase also recalled his version of what might have led Murray to fight him.

“I think Billy was trying to take me down a rung, and I was probably up a rung. I was probably a little too full of myself, you know. I realized when I left that maybe I hadn't been such a great guy. Maybe we weren't so close. Maybe I'd been somewhat of an a**hole,” he noted.

However, he admitted it was “water under the bridge.” As for Bill Murray’s side of the story, he recalled thinking of Chevy:

“I remember just sort of a general animosity that they felt, and he did come back as a star. When you become famous, you've got like a year or two where you act like a real a**hole. You can't help yourself. It happens to everybody. You've got like 2 years to pull it together, or it's permanent.”

Murray also explained that since he was the “new guy,” he thought it was his “job” to defend the existing cast members.

“It would have been too petty for someone else to do it. It's almost like I was goaded into that, you know, I think everybody was hoping for it. I did sense that. I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving, and making his own career go,” Bill explained.

Murray added that in the improv world, everyone was part of an “ensemble” or a “company,” which is why Chevy Chase’s departure from SNL came as a “shock,” especially because:

“He got the most sketches. He had the most influence, he got the most publicity, all of those things. So, they didn't miss that part of it. But there was still a hangover feeling that he shouldn't have left until everybody had that.”

Two years after the drama, the pair reunited on Caddyshack and even appeared in a scene together. In Chris Nashawaty’s book Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Bill Murray said that the collaboration was easy as they were “pretty comfortable” in each other’s spaces and characters, adding that the previously contentious relationship had turned “funny” at the movie set.

Chevy Chase agreed in the same book that they “got over everything” and the “tension was short-lived,” adding he only had “admiration and affection” for Bill Murray, who, although “surly,” was ultimately a “good guy.”

During a September 2008 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Chase further explained:

“We've never been close, but we've been very friendly; we play golf together. [...] I think we've made an effort over the years to get to know each other better and to put that stuff behind us.”

He also told Esquire in 2010 that Belushi was the one who “instigated” the scuffle.

Bill Murray told author Nick de Semlyen, for his 2019 book Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ’80s Changed Hollywood Forever, that his fight with Chevy Chase was very “Hollywood” yet a “king of a non-event.”

“It was just the significance of it. It was an Oedipal thing, a rupture. Because we all felt mad that he had left us, and somehow I was the anointed avenging angel, who had to speak for everyone,” Murray explained.

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The exact reason why Chevy Chase was excluded from the 50th anniversary special of SNL remains unclear. However, his wife, Jayni, shared in the forthcoming CNN documentary that the showrunners promised that he husband would be included; however, they failed to live up to it.

Meanwhile, Lorne Michaels shared with PEOPLE:

“There were a couple of versions, and we went back and forth on that. There was also a caution from somebody, that I don't want to name, that Chevy, you know, wasn't as focused.”

Meanwhile, cast member Martin Short revealed that there were “too many people to fill” from the “50 years of casts.”

That same month, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase were photographed together at Chris Rock’s 60th birthday party in New York City.

Murray, who was part of SNL from 1977 to 1980, later mentioned Chase during the anniversary special’s Weekend Update segment.

“Next up, Cornelius Crane Chase, who we’ve all come to know as Conny. Let’s face it. ‘Weekend Update’ would simply not exist without him, so it would be wrong to have him listed anywhere but … No. 4,” Bill joked.

Speaking with The Washington Post in 2018, Chase had, however, thrashed the new generation of SNL. He said:

“I had to watch a little of it, and I just couldn’t f**king believe it. That means a whole generation of s–theads laughs at the worst f**king humor in the world. You know what I mean? How could you dare give that generation worse sh*t than they already have in their lives? It just drives me nuts.”

Last year, the Community star also criticized Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday Night, chronicling the legacy of the show.