Eddie Murphy almost played Michael Caine’s favourite role: “There were certain political reasons”
The point of being an actor is to play as many different characters in as many different types of production as possible, which doesn’t make it any easier to imagine a timeline where Eddie Murphy dropping out of a role would lead to him being replaced by Michael Caine. And yet, it happened.
If that wasn’t bizarre enough, it happened in the late 1980s, when the two stars were on very different career paths, never mind the fact that cinema’s favourite cockney is almost 30 years older than the former Saturday Night Live favourite who snowballed into becoming the biggest movie star in the world.
At the time, there was nobody bigger than Murphy. 48 Hrs, Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, and Coming to America had positioned him at the apex of the A-list, with his films bringing in billions of dollars at the box office and turning him into Paramount’s golden goose, all of which he’d accomplished by his late 20s.
Meanwhile, Caine had only recently returned from the doldrums, with his Oscar-nominated turn in Educating Rita and Oscar-winning performance in Hannah and Her Sisters rejuvenating a career that had stagnated after a series of duds and disasters like The Swarm, Ashanti, The Island, and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.
Usually, when an in-development project gains the interest of Hollywood’s brightest shining star and an unnamed big-name director, it’s a done deal. However, as screenwriter Dale Launer explained to Paper Crane Productions, the hot package for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels fell apart once it reached the boardroom.
“We had the biggest star in the world, we’ve got the script, and we have an A-list director,” he recalled. “We gave it to Paramount, Eddie had an exclusive deal with Paramount, and I got a call from a senior vice president there, who said, ‘Listen, we love the script, we love Eddie, we just don’t love that director’. There were certain political reasons.”
He never revealed what those political reasons were, but Launer hardly sounded enthusiastic when Caine was brought in to replace Murphy as Lawrence Jamieson. “We gave it to Michael Caine,” he continued. “Michael Caine was sort of, like, doing everything, so he didn’t open a movie.” To try and find someone who could open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the producers turned to Steve Martin.
Originally, they offered him Caine’s part, but everybody quickly realised he made a better Freddy Benson. At last, the comedy had its two stars, and Murphy’s loss would become a huge gain for the man who replaced him. It wasn’t a runaway hit when it was first released, but in the years to come, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels would end up closer to Caine’s heart than almost any other movie he made.
In fact, he admitted that it’s the only one of the 120+ pictures he’s made that he’ll watch any time he stumbles across it, and to think, the reason he even got the opportunity was because Paramount refused to sanction the filmmaker who came bundled with Murphy in those first deal-making meetings.
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