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Pop culture is haunted by ‘what ifs.’ What if they hadn’t died so young? What if they had more time? With John Belushi, those questions feel even heavier—because by the time of his death in 1982, he’d already achieved so much.
By 1982, the Saturday Night Live star had secured his place in comedic immortality. He was Animal House’s Bluto, a role bursting with such anarchic energy that it made him a Hollywood icon overnight. He co-founded The Blues Brothers, transforming a simple SNL sketch into both a chart-topping band and cult-classic film. And on stage, Belushi was something else entirely—a live-wire performer whose presence consumed every room, whose physical comedy was just as sharp as his wit. Ask anyone who came of age in the 1970s and early ’80s—he wasn’t just a comedian, he was a force of nature.
But by March of that year, John Belushi was dead at 33, found in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine in his system.
It was this hard, ugly ending that invited both scrutiny and sensationalism.
For Bob Woodward—the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who helped expose Watergate—Belushi’s death became the subject of a bestselling but deeply controversial biography: Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. To those who knew Belushi best, the book felt like nothing short of character assassination.
Bill Murray, Belushi’s SNL cast mate, longtime friend, and fellow Second City alum, was among those most troubled by Woodward’s portrayal. He’s never forgiven the journalist for it, even suggesting on a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience that Woodward, now 82, will someday have to answer for what he wrote.
“I Read Five Pages of Wired, and I Went, ‘Oh My God. They Framed Nixon.’”
Bill Murray is famously elusive—the kind of celebrity who exists as much in legend as in reality. He crashes weddings, tends bar unannounced at festivals, and appears in random places with that knowing smirk. “No one will ever believe you.”
He rarely does interviews, let alone sits down for a sprawling, two-and-a-half-hour conversation. Yet when the topic of Saturday Night Live and John Belushi emerged during his recent Rogan appearance, Murray didn’t hesitate to share his unfiltered thoughts on Wired, published just two years after Belushi’s death.
For decades, Woodward was considered journalism’s gold standard. His work with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal was instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
But for Murray, reading Wired completely shattered that image. “I read like five pages of Wired, and I went, ‘Oh my God. They framed Nixon,’” Murray tells Rogan. The reporting felt so wildly inaccurate about someone Murray had known intimately that it made him question everything else the legendary journalist had written—even the reporting that toppled a president.
“All of a sudden I went, ‘Oh my God, if this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known … for half my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to like the people of the outer, outer circle … what the hell could they have done to Nixon?’”
Watch the part of the Bill Murray / Joe Rogan interview about John Belushi on YouTube:
A Book That Did More Harm Than Good
When Woodward—not some tabloid hack but the Bob Woodward—turned his investigative focus to Belushi in the early 1980s, his approach left those who actually knew the comedian feeling betrayed. The problem, as Murray explains it, wasn’t just the conclusions—it was who Woodward chose to listen to.
“Wait a minute, you’re telling me that that guy over there … is telling you the facts about John Belushi? That guy, way the f** over there, is telling you who John Belushi is,” Murray says, clearly still bothered by it decades later.
Murray sensed trouble from the beginning and refused to participate in Woodward’s research. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I would have nothing to do with it. I didn’t like it. It smelled funny from day one,” he tells Rogan.
Dan Aykroyd, Belushi’s Blues Brothers co-star and best friend, shared Murray’s disdain. When Hollywood attempted to adapt Wired into a film, Aykroyd refused involvement, famously suggesting it would be better suited “as a horror film.” Belushi’s widow, Judy, similarly condemned the book for its “cold” and “merciless” portrayal of her husband.
John Belushi, The Lightweight Party Animal
Belushi’s death had already become a media circus by 1982 and 1983. The situation escalated when Cathy Smith, who was with him on his final night, gave an interview to The National Enquirer admitting she had injected Belushi with the fatal speedball mixture. Her confession led to extradition from Canada and a high-profile trial where she initially faced second-degree murder charges. Smith ultimately pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and drug charges in 1986, serving 15 months in prison—but by then, Woodward’s book had already cemented a narrative about Belushi that many close to him found unrecognizable.
Murray doesn’t deny that Belushi partied. He doesn’t pretend drugs weren’t involved in his death. What bothers him is how Wired reduced a brilliant, complex human being to nothing more than a cautionary tale.
“He made people’s careers possible. Mine would be one of them. All the people that he dragged to New York … He took over New York, and he dragged all of us from the Second City to New York.”
According to Murray, Belushi’s influence stretched far beyond SNL. “There are musicians, and lots of them, that will thank Belushi for the revival of the blues… There are all these venues that wouldn’t have existed without Belushi, like the entire House of Blues chain.”
What’s perhaps most surprising in Murray’s account is his characterization of Belushi’s actual tolerance for substances—a direct contradiction to the hard-partying image cemented in Woodward’s book.
“He was a short hitter. Guy could only drink like four beers, and he was drunk. So the idea that he died of an overdose is hilarious. Like, that’s what my brother said. He said, ‘What did he have, four beers?’ Because he was not really much of a drinker.”
Murray believes Belushi’s overdose wasn’t the culmination of a spiraling addiction but rather a tragic, singular mistake. “It was a speedball, yeah. And I believe, to my knowledge, it was like the first speedball he ever had.”
This perspective doesn’t erase Belushi’s struggles but challenges the narrative that his death was somehow inevitable. Murray, like others in Belushi’s inner circle, sees what happened as preventable—not predestined.
“He did a lot of things for people … He was absolutely magnetic.”
That’s the Belushi that Murray wants people to remember, not the caricature he believes Woodward created.
A Bigger Conversation About Trust in Media
Joe Rogan connected Murray’s criticism to broader questions about journalistic trust. “Once you see it from something that you know, you know, once you see propaganda or bulls*** from someone that you know, and you see a distorted perception, it really … opens your eyes to the fact that a lot of the things you read are horsesh**.”
Murray isn’t alone in his skepticism about Woodward’s methods. Ben Dreyfuss, journalist and son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, shared his family’s personal experience with Wired’s creation. Dreyfuss’s mother was dating Belushi when he died and, according to Dreyfuss, was the only person who had seen a video Belushi filmed the night before his death.
When she refused to share this video, Woodward allegedly harassed her relentlessly—to the point where Richard Dreyfuss had to involve his lawyer (who happened to share a client with CBS, where Woodward contributed) to make him back off.
“As retaliation in that book he calls my dad a drug addict (true) and my mom a ‘hard-faced woman’ (false),” Dreyfuss wrote.
Years later, at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Dreyfuss recalls seeing Woodward honored and fighting the urge to be polite. “The truth is my mom is such a nice woman and he was really bad to her and he can f**k himself. But everyone was like ‘oh wow Ben not nice.’”
He makes no pretense of objectivity about Woodward: “I’m sure Bob Woodward has done some good work in his life, but he was very unfair to my mom and I don’t pretend to be objective about him. He can go f**k himself.”
The fastest way to blackpill anyone on journalism is to have the press cover something they personally experienced or know very well.
This is legitimately how I felt when I read the book. My mom was dating John Belushi when he died and she is the only person on earth to have seen the video he made the night he died. Woodward was really bad to her bc she wouldn’t turn over the tape https://t.co/AfKToun7v0
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) March 2, 2025
This conversation touches on something larger than just Belushi’s legacy—it raises questions about how narratives get shaped, and who gets to define “truth.” In 1984, Woodward’s Wired was treated as the definitive account of Belushi’s life. There was no social media to challenge it, no podcasts where someone like Bill Murray could offer an alternative perspective to millions of listeners.
As Rogan points out: “Back then, … there’s no other venues for people to express themselves. Back then, it was like he writes the book, he does the interviews for the book. This is the narrative.”
Murray had spent considerable time around journalists in the 1970s and ’90s, including his friend Hunter S. Thompson, so he wasn’t naïve about the storytelling choices they made. But reading Wired was a wake-up call: even the most trusted reporters could get it completely wrong.
“Bob Woodward, like, one of the squarest guys in the world, gets to tell the story of what it was like to live in New York City in the ’70s? Really? In the late ’70s and ’80s? Like, he knows the story? Come on.”
