Bill Murray and Bob Woodward reportedly exchanged “tense” words over the Watergate reporter’s book on John Belushi when they came face to face at the Kennedy Center over the weekend.
Their spat took place on Sunday at a screening of “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a documentary on the former Washington Post publisher.
“Bill Murray and Bob Woodward had words about Woodward’s Belushi book tonight at the Kennedy Center,” reporter Ben Terris wrote in a post on X.
“It was a little tense,” added Terris, who is leaving The Washington Post after 11 years to join New York magazine.
Representatives for Murray and Woodward did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
The quarrel concerned Woodward’s 1984 biography of John Belushi, “Wired,” which Murray slammed during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Saturday.
The late Belushi, who was found dead of a drug overdose at age 33 in 1982, was Murray’s former “Saturday Night Live” castmate and close friend.
“I read like five pages of ‘Wired,’ and I went, ‘Oh my God. They framed Nixon,’” Murray told Rogan.
Woodward and fellow WaPo journalist Carl Bernstein famously broke the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, for which they won a Pulitzer Prize.
“If this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known, you know, for half of my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to like, the people of the outer, outer circle, getting the story – what the hell could they have done to Nixon?” Murray said, attacking Woodward for using sources too far away from Belushi.
“You’re telling me that that guy over there, that guy whose that far away from the center of things, is telling you the facts about John Belushi? That guy way the f–k over there is telling you who John Belushi is?”
Murray tore into Woodward’s reporting on Belushi, calling it “criminal” and “cruel.”
“I acknowledge I only read five pages, but the five pages I read made me want to set fire to the whole thing,” he said. “He’s gonna have to answer for that sometime.”
He shared kind words about Belushi, saying many actors and comedians slept on the late star’s couch through the years when they had nowhere else to go.
But Woodward’s book “tore down my friend,” Murray said. “Just the title alone. It was cold.”
Murray implied that Woodward’s unflattering portrayal of Belushi may have come from a place of jealousy, saying Belushi is the most famous person from Wheaton, Illinois – while Woodward is the third most famous from the same town, trailing football player Harold “Red” Grange.
Judy Belushi Pisano, the late comedian’s widow who died last year at 73, also slammed Woodward’s book as inaccurate after it was published in the 1980s.
“The man in Wired is not the man I knew,” she said.
