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The Day Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson Became Ghostbusters Again

An eyewitness account of their return as Venkman, Stantz, and Zeddemore in Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Image may contain Interior Design Indoors Lighting Human Person Ernie Hudson Jr. Room Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd
Ghostbusters: Afterlife — Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson return as their iconic characters.Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

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This post contains specific details about the creation of the Ghostbusters: Afterlife finale. If you have not seen the film and want to maintain the mystery a little longer, read no further. Major spoilers ahead... 

Each Ghostbuster has a different way of busting ghosts. On set, when there’s no arc of VFX energy flashing from their proton blasters, it’s easy to see: Dan Aykroyd waves gradually from side to side, like someone watering a garden. Bill Murray pulls steadily back and up as if he’s reeling in a heavy fish. And Ernie Hudson’s hands tremble as if he’s clutching a sparking live wire.

More than 32 years have passed since we’ve seen these three actors in a Ghostbusters movie together, playing smart-ass Peter Venkman, hyper-stimulated Ray Stantz, and unflappable Winston Zeddemore. These guys became pop culture touchstones to kids who flooded theaters in the summers of 1984 and 1989 and wore out their VHS tapes rewatching the original and its sequel. But as decades piled up, fans lost hope of seeing them together again. A third sequel was proposed many times but always fell apart over budget and script disagreements. The 2016 reboot, Answer the Call, starring Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Melissa McCarthy, dropped the original story line to establish an entirely different universe. Murray, Hudson, and Aykroyd made cameo appearances in that film but not as their iconic characters.

A torch had been passed; or maybe it had gone out. Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the first movies with Aykroyd and costarred as the somber science genius Egon Spengler, died in 2014 after a long illness. After that, a true reunion no longer seemed possible. But then on a blustery autumn day two years ago, the surviving original guys stepped onto the Calgary soundstage of Ghostbusters: Afterlife and took their battle positions beside a weathered old farmhouse and the battered hulk of the Ecto-1.

Like their signature emergency vehicle, the guys were rusty. Their hair was gray, or full-on white in Murray’s case. The flight suits were a little baggier. But if you ever laughed at lines like Venkman’s plaintive “Dogs and cats, living together…mass hysteria!” or Zeddemore’s slow-burn “When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes,”  just the sight of them hoisting their proton packs again is enough to raise a smile. 

It was all going great. Until Murray accidentally got bashed on the head.

Now that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is in theaters, the behind-the-scenes story of their reunion, long kept under wraps, can finally be shared. Fair warning—there are significant spoilers ahead:

The foundation for Murray, Hudson, and Aykroyd’s comeback started to come together nearly three years ago, when Up in the Air and Juno filmmaker Jason Reitman, the son of the original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, proposed a new story. It was one he hoped would unite the various fan factions, including the many who loved director Paul Feig’s 2016 reboot. (While Ghostbusters has sometimes become a culture-war battleground, the filmmakers themselves have always been collegial, and supportive of one another.)

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Like the 2016 film, Jason Reitman’s concept was female-led, centering on a financially strapped single mom, Callie (Carrie Coon), and her outcast daughter, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), who is struggling to make new friends. Callie’s lovesick gearhead son, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) restores the Ecto-1 he finds in their late grandfather’s barn and tries to impress his too-cool-for-him crush Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), who knows everything about the weird little town—except who his grandfather really was. Paul Rudd costars as a summer school teacher who’s a veritable stand-in for fanboy Gen Xers, steeped in knowledge of the original Ghostbusters, while Logan Kim plays a conspiracy-obsessed middle school pal of Phoebe’s. Every generation has a stake in the tale.

By making Callie, Phoebe, and Trevor the descendants of Egon, the new story also acknowledges the absence of Ramis and creates a mystery about what happened to the remaining Ghostbusters. When Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan first crafted the script, they weren’t sure who, if any, of the originals would agree to revisit this world. The audience doesn’t really find out either—until the final scene of the film. Shooting that sequence was the day Venkman, Stantz, and Zeddemore finally came back together again.

Here’s the setup for the Ghostbusters’ High Noon moment at the very end of the film: Basically, all hope is lost. As Afterlife reaches its climax, the grandchildren of Egon Spengler have realized their late grandfather died trying to prevent the resurrection of Gozer the Gozarian, the ancient Sumerian god who tried to spark an apocalypse in the 1984 film. Estranged from his doubtful old colleagues, Egon worked alone on his plan but couldn’t accomplish it by himself. His family members have fallen just short, too. They are cowering, prepared to be annihilated by an enraged Gozer, when they hear a voice call out from around the corner of the farmhouse.

“Hey…flat top!”

This is the moment that brought the original actors back together again.

It’s Venkman. And Stantz. And Zeddemore. And their fully powered proton packs. Thanks to Phoebe’s desperate call to Ray’s occult bookstore earlier in the film, the cavalry has arrived, a deus ex machina in the form of three old-timers—who quickly break their old rule and cross their proton streams to paralyze the snarling, Bowie-esque glam-demon.

But there are only three of them now, not four. So the old tactic doesn’t work. The first thing Hudson, Murray, and Aykroyd shoot that morning is getting cast aside. Gozer hurls the Original Ghostbusters (a.k.a. The OGBs, as they were nicknamed on set) back against the steel hull of the Ecto-1. This plot point literally makes the absence of Egon hurt. 

“Well, we are a man down. That’s the deal,” Murray told Vanity Fair on set. “And that’s the story that we’re telling, that’s the story they’ve written.” 

Getting back into Venkman’s head was unexpectedly hard for him, he said, but by the time Murray was in uniform and flanked by Hudson and Aykroyd, he admitted to feeling like an actual rock star again. “Danny and Ernie and I together, not in separate scenes, but together—there’s a force. It’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have done their solo albums, but when they’re all on the stage, it’s a whole different thing,” he said.

It has been many years since Aykroyd reunited with his old Saturday Night Live friend on anything. “It was really fun to be back,” he said after shooting the scene. “Billy is such fun anywhere he goes. He’s one of those human beings that has that magnetism. You just look at him and you’ll laugh. And him sloping around in that pack, which he doesn’t like wearing any more than any of us, it’s just so funny. To see him just lurking around in that pack and putting up with it. Yeah, it’s been a great week.”

After feeling awkward for the first few days, what finally energized Murray was the chance to improvise again while Venkman lay sprawled with his cohorts beside the vehicle. “Bill is keeping her distracted with talking, while you raise the proton gun,” Jason Reitman said, showing the fallen Hudson how he wanted him to slyly slip his neutrona blaster into position. 

In the script, Venkman decides to taunt Gozer by imagining a far more intimate relationship than the two actually had back in the ’80s, with Murray adding new flourishes on every take, only some of which ended up in the finished film. “You know, you wasted a lot of time putting on that make up,” he yells. “It’s not going to work anymore. You’ve got a lot of nerve trying to crawl back.”

“The scene I just did now, it was fun,” Murray said afterward. “I got to just say what I wanted to say, and it was always that way. The script was just our jumping off point.”

Hudson, who comes from a classical acting background, still marvels at his improv-trained costars. “I’ve done, sheesh, I don’t know, probably 250 credits or something, but working with Bill Murray and seeing him and Danny trying to come up with something, trying to fill the space, and then something really magical comes out of it...that’s unusual,” he said.

As Murray added variations to his insult barrage, Wolfhard, whose character is hiding near the collapsed OGBs, asked Jason Reitman: “Can I laugh?” He suggests maybe that will irritate Gozer even more. The director urges him to keep playing the moment low-key.

But Gozer was also cracking up. Olivia Wilde, who sported the extreme pompadour hairstyle and scaly boils and baubles of the monster in Afterlife, sometimes had difficulty keeping a straight face. At one moment during Murray’s epic roast of Gozer, Wilde broke and laughed out loud. “You got me on that one,” she told him. “Too far. TOO FAR!”

While Hudson prepared to take his shot, Reitman encouraged Aykroyd to join in the verbal jabs. “For Stantz, I feel like your insults would be about her actual cosmic properties,” the director said.

Akyroyd nodded, agreeing that Gozer might feel some insecurity about rival deities. “Hawaiians have better gods than you!” he shouted. “Pele could kick your ass!”

As they work through their takes, Murray couldn’t help but torment his costars a little too. He brushed away some of the dirt and straw on the ground to reveal a rectangular shape beneath Hudson. “Have you got a pad here!?” asked Murray, who did not have one himself. He narrowed his eyes at Hudson and shook his head. “You’re soft,” he declared.

Hudson played it off with a grin. “Nah,” he said. “That was for the stunt man!” Then he leaned back and luxuriated in his camouflaged comfort spot.

Murray wasn’t the only one who initially felt out of place while returning to this world. Despite being one of the OGBs, Hudson said the first few days on set left him “feeling very isolated.” “Maybe I should extend myself a little bit more. But that’s just me,” Hudson said in his trailer during a break. “The guys are great. Bill will come by and knock on the door and he’ll invite me and shit. I guess I’m just weird. I have friends, I think I’m a friendly guy. But I don’t invite myself. I go and get my lunch, and I’ll come back here and eat it alone.”

The day before, he said, things finally changed. That’s when he became friends with Gozer. 

Wilde, in her spiky exoskeleton bodysuit and Pazuzu makeup, approached the introverted Hudson in the food line. “She says, ‘Ernie, you going to have lunch here?’ And I said, ‘If we could find a table.’ So we sat down together and then Ivan came, and the table filled up with people, and I go, ‘Wow, this is kind of cool,’” Hudson said. “I’ve always been a little bit like that; just a little awkward. But Gozer invited me. All I need is one other person.”

Back on set, Gozer had stopped being friendly. Wilde moved in for the kill.

After Jason Reitman called cut, the guys shambled to their feet while the crew prepared a new setup. Hudson rose first and swung around just as Murray began to stand beside him. 

That’s when his proton blaster connected with Murray’s frontal lobe. 

Hudson winced as if he were the one who’d been struck. “I hit him on the head with my gun as he was getting up,” he explained to onlooking crew members, as Murray left to get checked by the set medic.

The accident slowed things down for a beat. Murray got knocked hard, enough to leave a mark. But he was okay. He returned a few minutes later, playing it up like he was gravely wounded but had valiantly rallied. His young costars went along with the joke. “Yeah, I mean, what’s a concussion anyway?” Wolfhard said.

Murray smirked at the Stranger Things kid. “What’s a concussion?” he repeated. “Close your eyes.…” He raised his proton blaster like a club.

Hudson approached to apologize again, but Murray waved it off. “It’s okay,” Murray said, proclaiming loudly: “I learned a valuable lesson!”

Soon, cameras were rolling again. Venkman’s distraction didn’t work. Gozer zapped away Zeddemore’s weapon and prepared to obliterate them. But off to the side, Phoebe unleashed her own proton blast on the creature—saving the OGBs who came to save her. As they lumbered to their feet, Stantz says, “I don’t remember this job being so painful!”

I do,” Zeddemore groans. At that point, the actors weren’t acting.

“It’s true,” Aykroyd said later. “Jason says ‘Okay, you guys, hop up now.’ Yeah, there will be no ‘hopping up’ here. There will be a slow climb to one knee, a hefting of the pack, both hands grasping the automobile as a leverage point, and pulling myself up to my feet. That’s the ‘hop’ that you’re going to get.”

The day led them to one of the most significant moments in the film, one that actually scares everyone involved—not because it’s spooky or eerie, but because it is bittersweet.

This requires one more major spoiler warning

In a story about ghosts, no one is ever truly gone. And the spirit of Egon, looking years older than Harold Ramis ever got to be in real life, manifests in the climax to help steady his granddaughter in her showdown.

Throughout the process, the filmmakers were determined to handle the moment with a sense of awe and respect. Jason Reitman hired Bob Gunton, perhaps best known as the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, to do the performance capture for Egon, saying the seasoned actor brought a strength and presence that radiates through the ethereal glowing effects. Gunton sported the character’s high cockatoo hair, but his face was replaced with a digital image of Ramis. Though he didn’t have any spoken lines, his silent facial expressions echo in in the ghostly onscreen version of Egon.

Ramis died years before the Afterlife script was even conceived, so he had no involvement in the story, but Reitman did consult extensively with his family, including daughter Violet Ramis Stiel, author of the book Ghostbuster’s Daughter, before moving forward with the concept. The actor’s survivors agreed to let the filmmakers re-create his likeness, but of course no one can know for sure how Ramis would feel about it.

Except…

Looking back at the notes from my own interview with Ramis from 2002, he said something that suggests he'd be pleased with the way the film handles his loss. Back then, he was discussing how he often added a tone of wistfulness to his own films. “I like to leave a strange note in people's evenings where they say, ‘Gee, I just saw a comedy, but there's something a little sad in there,’” he said.

Ramis interview from December 2002.

Without revealing the specifics of the finale, Egon and his old friends join forces one more time. Evil is vanquished, and the world is saved. In the moments that follow, everyone involved gets an emotional catharsis, including the audience.

For so long, all fans wanted was a reunion of these actors. What no one realized—maybe not even Hudson, Aykroyd, and Murray—was that they actually needed a goodbye. Ramis, now seven years gone, also got the bittersweet note he was so fond of threading into his own comedies. 

The sad ending, as it turns out, could also be a happy one.

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