The movie Eddie Murphy made purely out of spite: “Let me show you what I can fucking do”
Confidence and self-belief have never been in short supply for Eddie Murphy, but even he’s been rattled by the rollercoaster ride any lengthy career in Hollywood can often be.
Things got so bad that he exiled himself from the industry for years after becoming the last person in the world to realise that he’d been making too many terrible movies, with the former Saturday Night Live star taking an extended break after discovering the Razzies were the only awards ceremony willing to recognise his contributions to cinema.
That wasn’t the first time he’d hit a rough patch, even if there was an air of inevitability to his first downturn. After all, Murphy had become a legend of the stand-up circuit with his incendiary stage shows before seamlessly exploding into one of the biggest names in Tinseltown, lending his name to a succession of hits like 48 Hrs, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, and Coming to America.
However, by the mid-1990s, he found his appeal waning among critics and audiences. Another 48 Hrs was savaged compared to its influential predecessor, Boomerang was a box office hit but received a middling response, The Distinguished Gentleman fared even worse and became Murphy’s lowest-grossing release in years before it was immediately usurped by Vampire in Brooklyn.
Not only did he need to prove to himself that he still had the Midas touch, but he was determined to stick it to his growing army of detractors, too. Deciding the best way to showcase his versatility and remind people that he was one of his generation’s most formidable comic performers, Murphy signed on to play seven different characters in 1996’s The Nutty Professor.
“I had a bunch of movies that didn’t work,” he admitted to Rolling Stone of the impetus behind the remake of the Jerry Lewis original. “People were saying, ‘Eddie’s not good’, so I was like, ‘Not good? Let me show you what I can fucking do. I’ll do something where I play all these different characters’. It’s a trip; it seems every five or six years, you have to do something to remind them that they like you.”
That’s exactly what The Nutty Professor did, taking almost $275 million in ticket sales during its theatrical run to become the leading man’s biggest commercial hit in a decade and earning Murphy his first Golden Globe nomination in a dozen years when he was shortlisted in the ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ category.
Murphy confessed that part of the reason why audiences fell out of love with him was that he was making movies because the studios “throw so much paper at you that you can’t say no to it.” The Nutty Professor was made to prove a point and succeeded in its goals, even if it wouldn’t be too long before the leading man reverted to type and became a fixture of the Razzies again.
