and really feel the emotion of the pieces that they're playing.'įrom left, Bill Murray, Mira Wang, Jan Vogler and Vanessa Perez in New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization. We wanted to entertain and we wanted to really create something that's never really been seen.' For his part, New Worlds director Andrew Muscato - who filmed the tour's closing night performance in Athens - said that the mood inside the Odeon of Herodes Atticus amphitheater that evening was closer to a 'rock concert' than a study session. 'This is not a concert, and this is not one of those dreadful readings where an actor reads, let's say, the letters of Plato while somebody plays classical music. 'What we wanted to do was really create a show,' Vogler says. That roll call may sound more like homework than entertainment, but Murray and his collaborators made sure the mood was anything but stuffy. Touching down in such far-flung cities as Houston, Toronto, Sydney and Athens - where The Cradle of Civilization was filmed - the four put on command performances that mixed classical music and classic rock with readings from the works of authors and poets like Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman. Murray's traveling companions on the New Worlds tour included cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang and pianist Vanessa Perez. 'We were feeling like we were actual receivers and transmitters of something.' (Watch our video interview above.) 'We ended up, the four of us, doing this great music and this great literature all over the world,' he tells Yahoo Entertainment now. Premiering in theaters on, appropriately enough, Groundhog Day, the film preserves the final performance in the 2018 New Worlds global tour - inspired by the 2017 album - that sent Murray across the world as the emcee of a quartet of great music and literature aficionados.

But you've never seen the actor and comedy legend take on a role like the one he has in New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization. For decades now, moviegoers have watched Bill Murray hunt gophers, bust ghosts and befriend groundhogs.

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