The only time Eddie Murphy had to audition for a movie: “I had a couple that flopped before that”
Anyone who finds as much success as Eddie Murphy did at the beginning of his career can walk into virtually any role of their choosing, which is why auditions have always been such an alien concept to him.
The first and last time he actively campaigned for a job was in the early 1980s, when he auditioned for Saturday Night Live. He got the job, and in no time at all, he was a made man, ensuring that if somebody wanted him to be in a movie, they were the ones who’d need to come to him with an offer.
It’s mind-blowing when you think about it; Murphy had broken out as SNL‘s biggest new star in years, headlined the highest-grossing stand-up comedy special ever released in cinemas, taken top billing in five films that earned at least $150 million at the box office, and earned three Golden Globe nominations by the age of 29.
Rises don’t come much more meteoric, and few have either before or after he broke out to become Hollywood’s biggest star, but it’s impossible to keep that up forever. By the mid-1990s, Murphy was feeling trapped by his ironclad contract with Paramount, so he took one for the team to free himself.
Vampire in Brooklyn was crap, and he knows it, but it achieved its purpose; he had no more obligations to the studio, and he was free to take the next, and most important, step in his career. However, after several misfires in quick succession, the actor and comedian discovered that other outfits across town weren’t going to embrace him with open arms because of what he’s done in the past.
Harlem Nights, Boomerang, The Distinguished Gentleman, and Vampire in Brooklyn had all underperformed, indicating that Murphy’s bankability was on the wane. When he approached Universal in the hopes of securing a budget north of $50 million to play seven different characters in a remake of The Nutty Professor, the boardroom needed convincing.
“I think I had a couple movies that had flopped before that,” he acknowledged to Backstage. “And the studio was like, ‘Should we get somebody else to play all these characters?'” To convince them otherwise, he did something he’d never done before as an actor and created a proof-of-concept audition tape as the entire Klump family to show Universal that he could pull it off himself.
“I saw it this way,” he elaborated. “To get the studio to see it, I did makeup tests where I got Rick Baker to make me up as all those characters and put it on video and send it to the studio. They said, ‘OK, we get it.'” Had they not gotten it, then there were two outcomes: either the Klumps would be played by a variety of different actors, or The Nutty Professor wouldn’t get the green light to proceed.
Never one to be caught lacking in confidence, Murphy believed in his vision, and he was proven right when the comedy became his biggest hit in years, his best-reviewed performance in just as long, and the performance he considers to this day as the greatest he’s ever given.
