What Bill Murray learned from Bing, his 4-legged co-star in ‘The Friend'

Yahoo

03-04-2025

A Great Dane named Bing stars in the new movie The Friend, which follows a woman (Naomi Watts) who must take ownership of a dog that her mentor (Bill Murray) leaves her after he dies.
What seems like a dark premise offered Watts and Murray a unique opportunity to bond with Bing, both on-screen and when the cameras weren't rolling. Watts told Yahoo Entertainment she had countless positive memories with her four-legged co-star.
"He's just pure, solid gold. Every day was a good day with him," she said. "You know what stands out, because it never really happened again? When he got a tummy ache from eating too many treats. That was the only time I saw him feeling low throughout the experience."
Murray has worked with animals many times in his career, and he told Yahoo Entertainment that what struck him about Bing was "that he's himself all the time."
"He's never anyone else. He's never another animal. ... He's true to his nature all the time, as opposed to a person, who can be one way, then another way, then 300 other ways. He's consistently there," he said. "You can look at him and go, 'OK, I want to be more like him ... where I'm actually the person who I believe I am.'"
That's not exactly easy for a human, though, which is what makes Bing so great to work with.
"To do that, I've got to sort of eliminate all the debris floating around in my head and my emotions to be inside my skin," Murray said.
Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who wrote and directed The Friend, told Yahoo Entertainment that they did a "massive search all over the country" to find Bing, who plays the fictional dog Apollo. They found him in Des Moines, Iowa.
"You could see in his face right away, he had an extremely soulful countenance and worked really well with Bill. The only hitch at the time was that he was a little too young,' McGehee said.
Bing was just two years old during the casting process, so he still had some of his puppy features, which wouldn't work for The Friend. But the movie was delayed because of the pandemic, giving Bing four years to grow into the role of Apollo.
"We just asked Bing to be Bing for the most part, and he was very good at that," McGehee said.
Warning: The Friend
The Friend is based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Sigrid Nunez. Nunez told McGehee and Siegel that the movie ends about one day before the book does. That's because in the movie, Apollo lives. In Nunez's novel, he dies.
In the process of making the movie, McGehee and Siegel discovered a website that people use to check and see if a book or movie contains the death of an animal: DoesTheDogDie.com. But before they knew about that forum, Siegel said they decided that it would seem like "just a drag if he died."
Siegel acknowledged, though, that plenty of movies involving dog death did just fine at the box office — I Am Legend and Marley & Me, to name a few. Books like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows include devastating death scenes, but those books are recommended to children.
McGehee and Siegel weren't sure if the age of social media has affected consumers' relationships to seeing dogs die on screen, or if the people who check to see if the dog dies before watching a movie would be the same ones to sit out on classic dog movies, just in case something bad happened.
Murray had a theory, though.
"I guess if you're not in the mood for it, you know, it's probably a safety measure," he said.
"If a dog dies in a movie, is that bad? Well, it's natural. It's sad is what it is. ... You don't want the dog to die, and you're going to cry when the dog dies," he continued. "These are lessons, you know. What do you do when the dog dies? You get another dog. ... What do you do when you lose the game? You play another one."
is in theaters nationwide on April 4.