The one actor Eddie Murphy was banned from working with: “Too much trouble and money”
Being a generation talent comes with many privileges, and when Eddie Murphy was flying high as Hollywood’s single biggest star, he had approval over almost every aspect of his movies.
From the director to his co-stars and the script, the razor-sharp comedian and A-list leading man was in a position to handpick his collaborators. While things didn’t always work out as he’d hoped, he was still afforded more leeway over his productions than almost anyone else in the business.
Even when his star began to dim, Murphy remained capable of calling the shots. After all, he basically willed The Nutty Professor into existence to prove to his critics that he hadn’t fallen off, and the end result was a performance that he still regards as the best he’s ever given, and he’s an Academy Award nominee.
By the end of the 1990s, though, diminishing box office returns indicated that his multi-faceted turn as Buddy Love and most of the Klump family may have been a brief return to form. Metro flopped, Mulan was a hit, but he was only there in voice only, and Holy Man was a disaster, with Dr Dolittle sparing him the ignominy of his post-Professor resurgence being short-lived.
In his last big-budget offering of the millennium, Murphy suffered yet another dud when Life failed to recoup its budget from cinemas. The two-hander alongside Martin Lawrence finds them being incarcerated on a bogus murder rap and being sentenced to life behind bars, following their relationship evolving throughout decades of incarceration.
It’s far from the worst comedy flick he’s ever made, but there’s one aspect of the picture that continues to haunt him. The veteran Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated character actor Ned Beatty played the role of prison warden Dexter Wilkins, but Murphy wanted a much bigger name for the part.
One of the biggest names there’s ever been, in fact, after he revealed that he lobbied hard for Marlon Brando to get the gig. “I tried to get him to play the warden in Life, and the studio thought he was too much trouble and money,” he admitted. “To this day, whenever I see the movie, I think, ‘That’s supposed to be Brando.'”
Luring the mercurial icon back to the big screen in the late 1990s wasn’t the easiest task, with many trying and failing to coax another performance out of the Godfather legend to no avail, but Murphy and Brando had been friends for over a decade at that point, first meeting when he went over to the latter’s house for dinner during his Saturday Night Live days.
Since there were no guarantees that Brando would even show up, never mind behave himself on set and perform to an acceptable standard, his pleas fell on deaf ears. Everyone in the business knew Brando was a risk, and when Murphy asked for him, Universal told him that it wasn’t going to happen.
