Margaret Qualley may have found a way for Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray to relive their past once again, this time, though, to dust off old grudges and initiate some sparks.
During an Aug. 14 appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the actor shared during a game of “True or False” that she’d recently tried her hand at matchmaking.
“OK, I once tried to set up Bill Murray with my mom,” the “Honey Don’t!” star said, reading a prompt.
The host guessed this was false, but Qualley confirmed with a grin that it was totally “true.”
The 30-year-old explained that she ran into Murray just that day.
“Literally, tonight, Bill Murray pops into my backstage dressing room,” Qualley explained. “He pops in, he’s all … He’s wearing a Piggly Wiggly shirt.”
Murray starred alongside Qualley’s mother in the romantic comedy classic “Groundhog Day” back in 1993.
Qualley went on to share that she learned Murray now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, the same city where her mother currently resides.
“He’s like, ‘You know, your mom and I — we didn’t get along so good while we were making that movie. And he was like, ‘She took a long time to get her hair done, and she didn’t know her lines this one time, and I was like, ‘Yeah, well, I heard a different story, sir.’”
From there, Qualley said she started connecting the dots: Murray and MacDowell, both single, both in Charleston and both — as she put it — “crazy.”
“They’ve got this kind of rage towards each other, but maybe he’s trying to make amends,” she said. “Let’s get it together!”
Qualley recalled offering to give Murray her mother’s number so they could reconnect. “And you know, if he’s got any sense at all, he’d be the luckiest guy in the world,” she added.
Clearly entertained, Fallon called Qualley’s news “the biggest tea that’s ever been spilled on ‘The Tonight Show.'”
MacDowell and her former husband Paul Qualley share Margaret Qualley and two other children — 39-year-old Justin Qualley and Rainey Qualley, 36— together. After marrying in 1986, MacDowell and Paul Qualley divorced in 1999. In 2001, MacDowell married Rhett Hartzog, whom she divorced 3 years later in 2004.
In 2021, Murray told Collider in a profile interview that MacDowell drove him “absolutely crazy” on the set of “Groundhog Day.”
“She drove me absolutely nuts. We were always waiting for Andie MacDowell’s hair,” he said at the time. “I’ve thought about it many times, that I owe her a real apology because she did drive me crazy. I’m not really method, but I must have really resented the fact that she still hadn’t fallen in love with me. We were 17 weeks into the movie and she still didn’t like me.”
He also issued plenty of praise for her acting.
“But I’d like to put on the record that her performance in the film is really, really, really good,” he added. “I don’t mean really good, I mean what’s better that really good. It’s very good. It’s really great.”
