The heavy glass ashtray left Bill Murray’s hand with violent intent, slicing through the air of that small Virginia conference room with enough force to kill. It missed Richard Dreyfuss’s skull by inches, embedding itself in the wall behind him, the sound of impact still ringing in the silence that followed. The words Murray had spat just before the throw—”Everyone hates you.

You are tolerated.” —hung in the air like a verdict. For decades, Dreyfuss kept that moment locked away, a private scar from the most professionally successful and personally miserable summer of his career.

Now, at 79 years old, the Oscar-winning actor has finally broken his silence, laying bare the full, unvarnished truth about working opposite Bill Murray on the 1991 comedy classic What About Bob? , a film audiences still adore, and a production the two men at its center could barely stand to finish.

The confession comes as part of a broader, reflective look back at a career that has spanned six decades, from the sun-scorched decks of the Orca in Jaws to the corridors of power in Oliver Stone’s W. But it is the Murray story that has captured the public imagination, precisely because it confirms what had long been whispered in Hollywood circles: that the on-screen chemistry between the tightly-wound psychiatrist Dr. Leo Marvin and the blissfully unhinged patient Bob Wiley was not acting.

It was documentary footage of a genuine, festering animosity. Dreyfuss, speaking with the candor of a man who no longer has anything to prove or lose, has confirmed that the tension was not manufactured for the cameras. It was real, it was constant, and it very nearly ended in physical violence.

To understand the depth of the fracture, one must understand the men who walked into that production. Dreyfuss, at 43, was a decade removed from his historic Oscar win for The Goodbye Girl, a man who had clawed his way back from a very public cocaine addiction in the mid-1980s with a celebrated comeback in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. He was a serious actor, trained in the craft, fiercely intelligent, and unapologetically opinionated about the work.

Murray, on the other hand, was at the absolute apex of his commercial power, a comedic force of nature fresh off Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, whose improvisational genius was matched only by his mercurial, often chaotic, on-set behavior. They were oil and water, and Frank Oz, the legendary director of Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, was tasked with making them mix.

The friction began long before the cameras rolled. The production was plagued by casting delays and disputes over the script’s tone. Dreyfuss, aligning with the producers, envisioned a darker, more cynical comedy, a sharp satire of the psychiatric profession.

Murray, backing Oz, pushed for a warmer, more humanistic approach, one that made Bob Wiley a figure of genuine pathos rather than a mere punching bag. The two actors had crossed paths a decade earlier, when Dreyfuss hosted Saturday Night Live in 1978, just weeks after winning his Oscar. The encounter had been frosty; Dreyfuss found Murray’s sarcasm grating, and Murray found Dreyfuss insufferably self-important.

That lingering mutual disdain was merely kindling for the inferno that awaited them in the small-town Virginia locations where the film was shot.

The ashtray incident, which Dreyfuss has now described in detail, occurred during a story conference meant to align their visions for a key scene. Dreyfuss offered a note on Murray’s performance, a suggestion rooted in his belief that the film needed more edge. Murray, who had been simmering with resentment for weeks, snapped.

The verbal assault was swift and brutal, culminating in the declaration that Dreyfuss was universally despised on set and merely tolerated for the sake of the production. Then came the ashtray. Dreyfuss, who has always prided himself on his composure, simply stood up and walked out.

He did not yell. He did not retaliate. He left the room, leaving Murray alone with the wreckage of his own temper.

Murray has since confirmed the story, adding his own characteristic twist: a deadpan insistence that had he actually been aiming at Dreyfuss, he would not have missed.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the What About Bob? production is not that it was a nightmare, but that it produced such enduring comedy. Frank Oz, a director of immense patience and subtle genius, recognized that he had a volatile asset on his hands.

Instead of trying to suppress the animosity between his leads, he weaponized it. He encouraged Murray’s chaotic improvisations, knowing that they would provoke genuine, unscripted reactions from Dreyfuss, whose tightly-wound performance as Dr. Leo Marvin was essentially a masterclass in controlled fury.

The famous dinner scene, a comedic set-piece that runs only a few minutes on screen, took hours to shoot because Murray would relentlessly wander off script, testing Dreyfuss’s patience in character and out of it. The result is a scene of electric, unpredictable comedy, a testament to the strange alchemy that can occur when two actors who despise each other are forced to share a frame.

The irony is that Dreyfuss’s entire career has been defined by this kind of high-stakes, emotionally fraught collaboration. Long before Murray, there was Robert Shaw. The legendary British actor, who played the shark hunter Quint in Jaws, terrified the 26-year-old Dreyfuss from the moment they met.

Dreyfuss, cast at the last minute after initially turning down the role, stepped onto the set of Jaws on April 3, 1974, and was in front of the camera the very next day. He was a young man playing a seasoned oceanographer, and Shaw, a classically trained stage actor with a fearsome reputation, seemed to take personal delight in needling him. Shaw mocked his weight, his inexperience, his lack of stage credentials.

He goaded him into physical dares, once offering him $100 to leap from the mast of the Orca into the ocean. The tension between them was palpable, a quiet class war playing out beneath the surface of the film’s central conflict.

Yet, as Dreyfuss has repeatedly insisted, the dynamic with Shaw was fundamentally different from the one with Murray. With Shaw, there was a grudging respect that emerged through shared hardship. The brutal, five-month waterlogged shoot off Martha’s Vineyard, plagued by a malfunctioning mechanical shark nicknamed “Bruce,” forged a bond between the cast and crew.

Dreyfuss has described Shaw as a kind, gentle, funny man in private, who transformed into an “evil troll” the moment cameras rolled. The famous USS Indianapolis monologue, one of the greatest scenes in American cinema, was a product of this complex relationship. Shaw, an accomplished playwright, rewrote the speech himself, and his decision to actually drink before filming led to a disastrous first take that had to be scrapped.

The next day, sober and mortified, Shaw delivered the haunting five-minute monologue in a handful of takes, with Dreyfuss’s stunned, silent reaction captured on camera being entirely genuine.

That authenticity, the bleeding of real emotion into performance, is the thread that connects Dreyfuss’s most iconic roles. In Jaws, his horror at Quint’s tale of the USS Indianapolis was real. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his wide-eyed obsession was a reflection of his own intense commitment to the craft.

And in What About Bob? , his exasperation with Murray was a raw, unfiltered emotion that the camera captured perfectly. Dreyfuss has always been an actor who wears his intensity on his sleeve, a man who once admitted that watching himself in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz rattled him so badly he feared his career was over.

That fear, paradoxically, is what led him to beg Steven Spielberg for the role in Jaws after initially turning it down, a decision that would cement his legacy.

Now, at 79, Dreyfuss has largely stepped away from the screen. His focus has shifted to civic education, a cause he has championed with the same fervor he once brought to his craft. He has studied the subject at Oxford and has spoken publicly about his concern over the erosion of civic literacy in American life.

It is a fitting final act for a man who has always been an intellectual, a thinker who happened to be blessed with extraordinary talent. But the stories, the feuds, and the legendary tensions remain a part of his legacy. He has made peace with the fact that his greatest work was born from conflict.

Whether it was the simmering class warfare with Robert Shaw on the Orca or the explosive animosity with Bill Murray in Virginia, Dreyfuss has always understood that the friction was never the point. The work was.

The question that lingers, decades later, is whether the animosity between Dreyfuss and Murray ever truly subsided. The two men reportedly never spoke again after production wrapped on What About Bob?. Murray has since referred to the experience as “terribly unpleasant,” while acknowledging that it somehow worked.

He has admitted he doesn’t particularly like Dreyfuss as a person, but that the man still makes him laugh. Dreyfuss, for his part, has been characteristically philosophical, separating the professional friction from the finished product. He has acknowledged that the tension, uncomfortable as it was, sharpened both performances.

Frank Oz, the man caught in the middle, has offered the most balanced assessment, noting that the conflict was born not of cruelty, but of two passionate artists who each believed they knew the right way to make the movie.

As Dreyfuss finally opens up about the ashtray, the shouting, and the years of silence that followed, he does so without bitterness. He speaks of it as a chapter in a long, storied career, a story to be told with the same detachment he might apply to a scene from a film. He has survived the shark, the UFO, the addiction, and the flying ashtray.

He has won an Oscar, made audiences laugh and cry, and left an indelible mark on American cinema. And now, in his twilight years, he is choosing to share the truth, not to settle scores, but to offer a glimpse behind the curtain of Hollywood’s golden age. The ashtray missed his head by inches, but it hit the wall of history, and the echo of that moment has finally reached our ears.