Two Joels, One Very Different Film
The mix-up hinged on a name that looked familiar in Hollywood credits. Joel Coen was one half of the filmmaking team behind Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Joel Cohen, a different screenwriter, worked on Garfield: The Movie. Bill Murray reportedly mistook the latter’s name for the former’s when he agreed to the project.
How a Credit Became a Comic Story
The anecdote is funny because the two names suggested sharply different kinds of films: Coen’s dark, distinctive crime stories on one side, a comedy about a famously lazy orange cat on the other. But a screenplay credit is easy to skim, and the near-identical names made a brief assumption possible. Murray’s decision is often retold as a case of mistaken identity rather than a considered choice to join a Coen brothers production.
The distinction matters: Joel Cohen and Joel Coen were separate writers, and the film Murray joined was the live-action Garfield, not a Coen project. A tiny credit-reading error became part of the movie’s story—an unusually memorable explanation for how an actor ended up voicing Garfield.
