Bill Murray is clarifying that he and Kelis never dated, nearly two years after romance rumors sparked between the pair.
The actor, 74, briefly addressed the past rumors that he and Kelis, 45, were an item during his Feb. 28 appearance on SiriusXM’s Sway in the Morning to promote his movie Riff Raff. He mentioned having met the singer-songwriter while discussing his own experiences with hip-hop music.
“I met this girl names Kelis who— I got great press that I was dating her, which really raised my cred. Well, it was false humility again,” he told co-hosts Sway Calloway, Heather B and Tracy G, who laughed at Murray’s joke that the dating rumors “raised my cred.”
Murray said he and Kelis met after he first saw the video for rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s 1999 song “Got Your Money.” (Kelis features on the song.)
“I love that video, and I watch that and I kept going, ‘That’s the silliest thing. How did I miss that when it came out in the first place?’ It’s so crazy, and I’m going ‘Who is the girl with the red hair?’ ” he said. “And it was Kelis, and I just had to meet her sometime. And she turned out to be spectacular.”
Though Murray said he just “spoke with [Kelis] recently,” he denied those dating rumors were true when host Calloway said, “So you weren’t dating her?”
“No… but, you know, one of us could be on the rebound any second,” Murray said, making the group laugh.
Rumors first sparked in June 2023 when The Sun claimed the pair were seeing each other, just one year after Kelis’ late husband Mike Mora died of stomach cancer. Kelis addressed the rumors in responses to Instagram comments on a June 10, 2023 post she made, on which some commenters asked about the relationship rumors.
“Ma’am would you care to address these Bill Murray allegations?!? Cuz damn! What he doing with all that?!?” one person wrote at that time, to which Kelis responded, “lol no babe, I wouldn’t bother at all.”
When another Instagram user told Kelis in a comment that “media is destroying y’all,” she wrote in response, “Lol yeah maybe for now everyones dumb and will believe everything but the best part is we are both blessed, rich and happy. So who’s really laughing […] now that’s funny.”