James Gunn pays tribute to Bill Murray on his birthday

Director recalled the time he met Murray at a party

James Gunn has paid tribute to Bill Murray on the veteran actor’s 71st birthday.

Throughout the day, fans and people from the entertainment world have been sharing their memories of Murray to mark his birthday.

Guardians of the Galaxy director Gunn recalled how he saw Murray at an event but “freaked out” because he was so starstruck meeting him.

Writing on Twitter, Gunn said: “My Bill Murray story is once I was at a party and saw Bill and freaked out because he’s a hero.

“But you know, I’m cool, I don’t bother people like that. I’m just gonna sit on the couch and pretend like f****** Bill StripesGhostbustersGroundhogDay Murray isn’t standing right there.”

He continued: “But then he saw me and came over and shook my hand. He knew who I was, which was weird and cool. And then he knelt on the floor beside me and rested his elbow on my knee, like, leaning on me and he starting waxing poetic about how much he loved my work on Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

“I thought he was f****** with me but then I began hearing through other people how much he was talking up Scooby-Doo 2 around town and how much he loved the movie. Anyway, I hope he’s having a happy birthday.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Murray’s name began trending on Twitter as hundreds of fans shared anecdotes involving him on social media.

The actor’s habit for surprising his fans is well-documented. The 2018 documentary The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man explored the numerous bizarre interactions between Murray and his fans. One such story has resurfaced about the time he did the washing up at a student house party in Scotland.

Murray visited St Andrews in Scotland for a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. At the local Ma Bells bar, the actor met Norwegian student Lykke Stavnef and her friend Marie Bergene.

As reported by The Telegraph, Murray accepted their invitation to a nearby house party, which soon became crowded with students wanting to meet the Groundhog Day star.

“Nobody could believe it when I arrived at the party with Bill Murray,” Stavnef told the publication. “We met him in the bar and he made some jokes. He was just like the character in Lost in Translation.”

Playing the part of an ideal party guest, Murray offered to cook for his fellow revellers and then wash up the dirty dishes.

“It was really funny because he was pretty old compared with all the other people there, but he was so relaxed and it was really amusing when he started to wash up,” recounted Stavnef. “The alcohol ran out very quickly when word got round that he was with us,” Agnes Huitfeldt, an economics and finance student in attendance at the party, added.

“He was joking with me about reheating some leftover pasta and how drunk everyone was,” he added. “The pasta was probably quite hard to get off the dishes because they had been sitting around.”

Murray is set to reprise his Ghostbusters role of Peter Venkman for the forthcoming film Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which is due for release on 10 November.