The $850m role Eddie Murphy was too lazy to play: “It was a no-brainer”
You don’t become the biggest, highest-paid, and most bankable star of your era without putting in the hard yards, but once Eddie Murphy took his foot off the gas, it’s no coincidence that his career started to falter.
On one hand, even when he was making utter shite like Norbit, he still had to graft, since it’s not easy to spend so long sitting in the makeup chair to play several characters in the same film. However, if anyone had bothered putting even a little more effort into the script, it wouldn’t have been so bad.
Murphy debuted his soon-to-be signature schtick in Coming to America, the first time he played more than one role in a movie, and it arguably reached its apex in The Nutty Professor, which he’s repeatedly called the single greatest performance, or performances, of his career, bar none.
By the late 1990s, though, it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it the way it used to be. A string of abysmal and forgettable flops like Showtime, I Spy, Daddy Day Care, and The Haunted Mansion saw the Saturday Night Live icon going through the motions, and things conspired to get worse from there.
His Academy Award-nominated turn in Dreamgirls and the ongoing success of the Shrek franchise were rare bright spots in a sea of horrendous fare, with The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Meet Dave, and Imagine That earning him so much recognition from the Razzies that he exiled himself from Hollywood altogether. That’s not to suggest that one role could have prevented that from happening, but it might have.
Riding the crest of a wave after The Nutty Professor silenced the critics claiming his heyday was over, the smash hit Dr Dolittle and sorely overlooked Bowfinger showed there was still plenty of life in the old dog yet. In between those two pictures, Murphy had a decision to make. He could either return to the genre he helped pioneer with another action comedy or he could take it easier and headline another fish-out-of-water comedy. He chose the latter, and he probably shouldn’t have.
“They came to me, it was two scripts,” he told Complex. “It was Rush Hour. ‘It’s going to be action-comedy, and you’re going to be with Jackie Chan, and it’s action, it’s summertime, running, all this physical stuff’. The other was, ‘You’re in a robe in Miami’. It was a no-brainer.”
Murphy could have played the brash, trash-talking LAPD cop, James Carter, opposite Jackie Chan in Rush Hour, which hoovered up almost $250 million at the box office, ended 1998 as one of the ten top-earning titles in the United States, and gave rise to a trilogy that earned in excess of $850 million, with those three films earning Chris Tucker more than $50 million in salaries alone.
Since he couldn’t be arsed with the physical exertion, he opted for Stephen Herek’s Holy Man. “We went to Miami and made a horrendous film, but it was easy,” he explained. “I have to stop saying it was horrendous. The movie was soft; it wasn’t a great picture.” The satirical caper failed to recoup even half of its production costs in ticket sales, with Murphy’s laziness getting the better of him.
