Celebrity Portraits by Jake Chessum - Photo Gallery - LIFE

Finding the right prop for Murray, who was promoting The Life Aquatic at the time, was a funny (and expensive) challenge, Chessum recalls: “Bill does not have a publicist or anything. He gives you a cell phone number and everything goes down through his wife or him — whoever picks it up. So we had this [dilemma]: What are we going to do with him? He hadn’t called back; we didn’t know if the shoot was happening or not. Suddenly, at the very last second, Okay, it’s happening, it’s going to be on Sunday, Pier 59. What are we going to do? Nancy Iacoi, the Esquire photo editor, and I talked about it and came up with the idea: What if we have a fish in his mouth? Instead of a real fish, which obviously wasn’t going to happen, Nancy got a prop maker to make this fish for Bill to stick in his mouth. It was a rush job. I don’t know how much it cost, but it was a lot — in the end, they paid, like, four figures for this bloody thing. We got to the shoot. He turned up Sunday morning with his son, and he couldn’t have been more funny, charming, nice — like your favorite uncle. He was a knockout. But we get to the shoot and he’s like, ‘Oh, what’s this thing? Where’d you get this?’ And Nancy said, ‘Oh, God, you wouldn’t believe… . It cost 2,000 dollars’ or whatever. And he just cracked up. He said — because he’s a fisherman — ‘Babe, you could have got one of these at a bait shop for five bucks.’ He thought we were the biggest idiots.”