The one actor Sofia Coppola has “always wanted to work with”
When Sofia Coppola appeared in her father’s film The Godfather: Part III, she was quick to earn her fair share of ridicule, with her acting skills criticised and condemned.
It looked like her career was over before it had even begun, but luckily for Coppola, she wasn’t going to let the backlash get to her. She never wanted to be an actor, really, so instead she threw herself into other endeavours, like modelling, photography, fashion design, music videos, and television presenting.
By the end of the 1990s, with a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides given to her by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, she made her feature film debut, adapting the book with a strikingly beautiful eye for detail and bringing the simultaneous tragedy and fantasy of the Lisbon sisters to the big screen.
The movie was well-received, and years later, it remains a classic, adored by teenage girls across the world who relate to the struggles of the Lisbon girls, sadly falling victim to societal and religious repression and the toxic gaze of the neighbourhood boys. It marked the first of several Coppola films featuring Kirsten Dunst, with the pair becoming one of the most iconic director-actor partnerships of the 21st century.
They continued their collaborations with Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled, while, in the meantime, Coppola added other reliable actors to her repertoire for multiple films, like Elle Fanning and Bill Murray, and when Coppola finds an actor who seems to understand her specific world, where melancholy is undercut by dreams, she’s not going to let them go easily, sometimes even writing parts with them in mind.
However, there’s one actor Coppola would love to work with that might come as a surprise, as in a conversation with Emerald Fennell for Screen Daily, the director revealed that she has “always wanted to work with Eddie Murphy,” but she doesn’t “have the idea or the project.”
Murphy has long been associated with bad comedies, from The Adventures of Pluto Nash to Norbit, often donning fat suits or morphing into completely unrecognisable characters – whether they be a different gender or race – for the sake of a few laughs, and while Murphy’s career certainly started off strong with a role on SNL, followed by hit movies like Beverly Hills Cop, by the ‘90s and 2000s, many questionable cinematic decisions and subsequent box-office flops resulted in the tarnishing of his legacy.
I mean, Murphy has still found success throughout, albeit sporadically, with an Oscar nomination coming in 2006 for Dreamgirls and an ongoing voice role as the beloved Donkey in Shrek, but can you imagine Murphy in a movie like Lost in Translation or Somewhere, because he clearly has it in him to deliver a more dramatic performance when required, as demonstrated by his acclaimed turns in Dreamgirls and, more recently, Dolemite Is My Name.
Perhaps he needs a few more roles that stand in opposition to the likes of Daddy Day Care and Imagine That to bring him some credibility, and Coppola could certainly deliver that if she were to write a role with him in mind, but who knows what the director has up her sleeve next?
