How “the new Eddie Murphy” became a Hollywood pariah: “It really hurt his career”
One of the easiest and laziest things that happens in entertainment is when a new name arrives on the scene and is instantly christened as the second coming of someone vaguely similar, something Eddie Murphy experienced during his meteoric rise to fame.
Even though he grew up worshipping the legendary comedian, the Saturday Night Live star and stand-up sensation hated being compared to Richard Pryor. In his early years, he was relentlessly dubbed as the ‘new Richard Pryor’, which got under his skin because he wanted to be the first Eddie Murphy.
Eventually, he got his wish, with the actor’s unmatched track record of box office success catapulting him into a completely different stratosphere. In terms of cold, hard cash, he easily outstripped his idol. Murphy’s films made more money, and he even knocked Pryor off his perch when the former’s Raw dislodged the latter’s Live on the Sunset Strip as the highest-grossing stand-up movie of all time.
Because Hollywood is a cyclical place, it was inevitable that another youngster would come along and be branded as the ‘new Eddie Murphy’. When it happened, though, it didn’t come from the media, a studio executive, or an ambitious publicist. Instead, it came from Liam Neeson, and he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Through no fault of his own, Ahmed Best’s first feature film appearance was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. From the outside looking in, what aspiring actor in their early 20s would turn down the chance to work with George Lucas on the first Star Wars movie in almost two decades, especially as a pioneering CGI character the likes of which cinema had never seen before?
With the benefit of hindsight, it was a nightmare. Even though The Phantom Menace became the second top-earning film ever released in cinemas in 1999, Best’s Jar-Jar Binks took almost as much criticism as Jake Lloyd’s Anakin Skywalker, which had a devastating effect on his short and long-term mental health.
He was a performer doing the job he’d been hired to do in the way he’d been told to do it, but the vitriol was so overwhelming that it effectively killed any hopes Best had for a long and successful career by the time the dust had settled. And to think, Neeson thought he was going to be a huge deal.
“He came into a lot of criticism, I mean to the point where it really hurt his career,” his co-star told NME. “And I have to say, when I was making that film, he was probably one of the funniest guys, and talented guys I have ever worked with. I remember calling my old agent, and I said, ‘Listen, I think I’ve just worked with the new Eddie Murphy.’ And I still believe that. He had all of us in stitches.”
Instead, Best’s career went nowhere. The toxicity surrounding Jar-Jar Binks almost ruined him, and while he’s made his peace with the character and returned in several additional Star Wars productions, he didn’t even get to be Norbit-era Eddie Murphy.
