Bill Murray fans collectively wet themselves this weekend when the man himself appeared on an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit.

He was there to promote his new movie ‘The Monuments Men‘, which premieres in America this February. He was generous with his answers – posting lengthy replies. He also “sang” happy birthday to one user, much to everyone else’s jealousy.

Here are the ten things we learned from Bill Murray’s AMA:

1. He almost quit acting after filming ‘Broken Flowers’ because he didn’t think he could do anything better.

“Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie,” he said when asked which of his movies was the most fun to act in.

I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’ So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

And when it was done, I thought ‘this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.’ I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.

2. He signed on for ‘Garfield’ because he thought it was a Coen Brothers movie.

I had a hilarious experience with Garfield,” he said.

I only read a few pages of it, and I kind of wanted to do a cartoon movie, because I had looked at the screenplay and it said ‘Joel Cohen’ on it. And I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind.

3. He thinks ‘Groundhog Day’ deserved more props.

The scripts is one of the greatest conceptual scripts I’ve ever seen. It’s a script that was so unique, so original, and yet it got not acclaim. To me it was no question that it was the greatest script of the year. To this day people are talking about it, but they forget no one paid any attention to it at the time. The execution of the script, there were great people in it. It was a difficult movie to shoot because we shot in winter outdoors. If you ever get to go to Puxatawney, you should go, it is one of the few things that is BETTER than advertised. It’s really something to see. But doing the movie, shooting the scenes over and over, it’s like an acting challenge. It’s like doing a play and those same scenes over and over and again, so you can try to make it better or deeper or funnier than you made it previously.

4. Bill Murray is really into scientists.

“I think I would have liked to have met Gregor Mendel,” he said when asked if he could go back in time and have a conversation with one person, who would it be.

Because he was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own. That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought.

5. His strangest experience in Japan involved a live eel.

I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called ‘Making out in Japanese.’ it was a small paperback book, with questions like ‘can we get into the back seat?’ ‘do your parents know about me?’ ‘do you have a curfew?’

And I would say to the sushi chef ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’

And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said ‘would you like some fresh eel?’ and I said ‘yes I would.’ so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.

To see what else happened that day on Reddit, click here.

[Source : Rolling Stone]