Bill Murray isn’t likely to be the first actor that pops into your head when you think of someone to play beloved President Franklin Delano Roosevelt but the comedian is already earning Oscar talk about his portrayal in Hyde Park on the Hudson.
“You can’t get all ramped up and amped up about this thing all the time,” Murray said to The Huffington Post. “I mean, I got excited about it once [for his Oscar nomination for Lost in Translation], and it was odd. I won all the prizes, I won literally all the prizes all the way up to the last one. And I really thought, well, ‘I’ve just to go get this thing, I’ll be right back.’ And then I didn’t win, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s odd. How odd is that? I’m feeling so odd right now.’ And I came all dressed up and didn’t win. So I’m not going to get all crazy about that.”
Murray has tried to move on from the disappointment. “It was OK that I didn’t win, and I don’t have any hard feelings about it,” he said. “It was like, ‘OK, that was cool, I’m fine. I’m fine with the way my career’s gone. I’m happy with it. It’s gone great.’ The great thing about the Oscars that’s cool is that it means people are going to see your movie. That’s really the deal.”
Murray did put in a lot of preparation for the role, including capturing the way Roosevelt spoke. “It’s upstate New York, it’s a little bit of Dutch in it, because he’s Dutch,” Murray said. “It almost sounds Scandinavian. They’ve got kind of an ‘oot’ and ‘aboot’ thing, like Minnesota, Wisconsin, in there sometime. It’s just an inconsistent voice. It jumps around a little bit, so you had to be kind of flexible with it. I just tried to get as much of it in me as I could.”
Hyde Park on the Hudson hits theaters December 7.
