The director who hated working with Eddie Murphy: “A horrible, depressed, creepy guy”
Plenty of comedians have revealed themselves to be dark and troubled people away from the harsh glare of the spotlight, but Eddie Murphy was never one of them.
While he didn’t exist in a constant state of performance like other comics who refused to abandon their schtick whenever they were in public, it wasn’t as if he was secretly harbouring a completely different personality that was completely at odds with the character audiences had fallen in love with.
Then again, success comes at a price, and Murphy found more by his mid-20s than most can manage in a lifetime. Less than a decade after he debuted as a Saturday Night Live cast member, he was an A-list megastar with a billion-dollar filmography, a production company, and a reputation for being box office gold.
That brings its own set of pressures, which led to certain disagreements. John Landis worked with Murphy three times on Trading Places, Coming to America, and Beverly Hills Cop III, which allowed him to see many different sides of his leading man. In general, his experience across that trio of pictures could be described as mixed, although the actor might have a different perspective.
“Trading Places and Coming to America, he was very directable,” Landis told Ain’t It Cool. “On Trading Places, he was fantastic. He was very young. It was his second movie, and he was full of enthusiasm and he was happy. On Coming to America, he was kind of a horrible, depressed, creepy guy, but a great talent. He always took direction from me.”
It’s probably telling that Landis referred to Murphy’s gifts without actually acknowledging him as a person, especially when there ended up being bad blood between them. He’d originally planned on directing Coming to America himself, but after Landis’ involvement in the Twilight Zone tragedy, he decided to extend an olive branch to a filmmaker who needed a boost.
In return, “he fucked me over,” as Murphy put it. Still, that didn’t dissuade him from recruiting Landis to helm his third outing as Axel Foley almost a decade later, which he regrets for several different reasons, largely because it was a film he only made for the money, and it was clear to anyone watching that his heart really wasn’t in it.
To that end, Landis acknowledged that Beverly Hills Cop III was a strange time. “It was bizarre because he didn’t want to be funny,” he explained. “And there was nothing I could do to make him funny. I actually learned later that he was very jealous of Wesley Snipes, and Denzel Washington, and Sam Jackson, all of these guys who are making these big action pictures.”
From the sound of things, Trading Places managed to go off without a hitch. The other two? Not so much.
