The news that Bill Murray and Jim Jarmusch will be back working together this summer would have been tantalising enough, but Murray has let slip that the project they’re working on is a zombie movie, and that’s really got our interest piqued.
Speaking to the Phily while on tour with his variety show New Worlds: Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends, he revealed that “I’ve got a good job coming up. Brace yourself: It’s a zombie movie.
“Jim Jarmusch has written a zombie script that’s so hilarious and it has a cast of great actors: Rosie Perez, Daniel Craig. It’s titled The Dead Don’t Die, and it shoots over the summer.”
This won’t be Murray’s first zombie movie. He had a hilarious surprise cameo in 2009 comedy Zombieland playing himself. He wasn’t one of the infected but his character did like to dress up as a zombie so he could head into zombie-infested LA without being spotted. It appears that in this new film, too, he won’t be one of the walking dead. “No, I will not play a zombie,” he confirmed.
Jarmusch has form with genre movies. In 2013, he made his idiosyncratic take on the vampire film with Only Lovers Left Alive, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as a vampiric couple who’ve been together centuries. This will be Jarmusch’s third time working with Murray, following Coffee and Cigarettes and Broken Flowers. The Dead Don’t Die will also see Jarmusch working again with Adam Driver, the lead from his most recent movie Paterson. Selena Gomez, Chloë Sevigny and Austin Butler are also officially in the cast list, but Murray’s assertion that Rosie Perez and Daniel Craig will be in the film too has not been confirmed.
Either way, we now have our new most anticipated film of 2019.