The movie that almost derailed Eddie Murphy’s career: “I got fucked up”
Every actor dreams of conquering their chosen field, finding consistent success, and making a shitload of money along the way. Eddie Murphy achieved all that earlier than most, but it came back to haunt him when he discovered he was completely ill-equipped to handle his first major failure.
For most of the 1980s, attaching Murphy’s name to a movie was a guarantee of immense profitability. Weaponising his comedic gifts, natural charisma, and effortless screen presence, he was a superstar before the credits had even rolled on 48 Hrs, thanks to a Golden Globe-nominated debut performance in a box office smash.
Best Defense excluded, the hits kept on coming: two more Golden Globe nods for Beverly Hills Cop and Trading Places, The Golden Child, and Coming to America strapped a rocket to Murphy’s back and launched him towards the A-list, with his first handful of features earning over a billion dollars in ticket sales and turning him into one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars.
He couldn’t keep it up forever, though, and the final year of the decade saw the first domino fall. Opting for a change of pace, Murphy wrote, directed, and starred in period-set comedy Harlem Nights opposite Richard Pryor, winning him a Razzie for ‘Worst Screenplay’ to rub salt into the wound of the film becoming his first-ever flick that didn’t set the box office alight.
“Harlem Nights was like having a mortal shell go off in your front yard,” he told GQ. “I had never had a flop picture before. All of a sudden, there was a flop. It was like, ‘Oh, shit’. The script was shitty. I wrote it in two weeks. And it shows. But I had to direct to see if I was going to dig directing. And I didn’t dig it.”
To try and combat his first bomb, Murphy dived into what he assumed would be an easy rebound: Another 48 Hrs, the sequel to his breakout first film. It made money, but it was also his worst-reviewed effort to date. In trying to play it safe, the actor had inadvertently made things worse for himself.
“Another 48 Hrs was reactive,” he confessed. “I got fucked up on Harlem Nights, so it was like, ‘OK, let’s do something that’s a sure hit. Is Cop III ready? Coming to America again?’ The idea was contrived, and we threw it together, and they wrote these big cheques out, and we did it.”
Next up was 1992’s double-bill of Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman, and while both of them turned a profit, they earned less money combined than Beverly Hills Cop II had made on its own, the first telltale sign that Murphy’s drawing power was starting to wane, and he knew it.
The star admitted that “everything came too easy, and when the laughs start to come too easy, you start doing things like walking through movies.” By the mid-1990s, it was being predicted that he’d never be able to recapture his former glories, and as true as that was to a certain extent, it did at least inspire Murphy to make The Nutty Professor out of spite to show his critics that he still had it.
