The classic movie Sidney Poitier told Eddie Murphy to turn down: “You’re not Denzel”
After exploding onto the scene and becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest, most bankable, and highest-paid stars within a couple of years of his screen debut, there weren’t many people in the industry who could tell Eddie Murphy what to do. However, Sidney Poitier was definitely among them.
He made history when his Academy Award win for ‘Best Actor’ in Lilies of the Field made him the first Black man to win a competitive Oscar and the first Black performer to win in a leading category, a watershed moment that inspired multiple generations of performers.
In the years to come, Poitier would be viewed as a mentor, father figure, and influence to a litany of future stars, including Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Viola Davis, Halle Berry, and Will Smith, all of whom would go on to win Oscars of their own. In particular, Denzel Washington developed a close friendship with the legend, who became a sounding board as he navigated his own career.
As someone who’d started off in stand-up comedy and the sketch stylings of Saturday Night Live before conquering the silver screen, Murphy was more indebted to Richard Pryor than Poitier, at least in terms of following a similar path. Broad, crowd-pleasing movies were his bread and butter, but when he considered branching out and moving into drama, he was swiftly convinced otherwise.
When an adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X first entered development, Spike Lee wasn’t attached as the director. Instead, Oscar-nominated veteran Norman Jewison was at the helm. Understandably, there was a backlash towards a white filmmaker tackling such an important story, but it was during the Jewison period that Washington was brought on board to play the title role.
Alex Haley, who co-authored the autobiography that partially inspired the film, was originally going to be a character in Malcolm X. In what would have been a drastic departure from his usual crowd-pleasing comedic shtick, Murphy was sought for the part until Poitier gently convinced him otherwise.
“Early on, Sidney said – I don’t know if it was an insult or a compliment or something – they were talking about doing Malcolm X,” he explained. “Norman Jewison was putting it together, and they were gonna use The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. And they approached me about playing Alex Haley.”
It would have been the first major dramatic turn of his career until Poitier weighed in. “And some-kind-of-where around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something. And I asked him, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking about playing Alex Haley’. And Sidney Poitier said, ‘You are not Denzel, and you are not Morgan’. You are a breath of fresh air. And don’t fuck with that’. And I was like, ‘What?'”
It might have knocked him for a loop, but it’s clear what Poitier was getting at. Murphy wasn’t renowned for his dramatic gifts like Washington or Freeman, but what he did have working in his favour was his status as the first Black actor to consistently headline a string of hit movies that earned upwards of $100 million at the box office, having done so seven times within a decade of his debut in 48 Hrs.
‘Stay in your lane’ might be a reductive way of summarising the advice, but it’s not inaccurate. Murphy was doing something nobody had done before, and Poitier wanted to see him keep doing it.
