How Richard Pryor setting himself on fire gave Eddie Murphy a movie career: “I’ve got this client”
Eddie Murphy was too talented not to become a movie star eventually, but his rise up the Hollywood ranks may have been accelerated by his idol, Richard Pryor, almost immolating himself during a near-fatal freebasing incident.
When he was first starting out on the stand-up circuit, Murphy looked to Pryor as an inspiration. He worshipped the trailblazing, pioneering, and enormously successful comic, but by the end of the 1980s, the former had become a much bigger star than the latter had ever been.
That’s not to play down Pryor’s achievements, but the facts speak for themselves: The highest-grossing stand-up film ever released in cinemas was Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, until it was overtaken by Eddie Murphy: Raw, and that record has stood unbroken since 1987.
On the big screen, Pryor starred in a string of hit movies, but none of them came close to the earning power that became synonymous with Murphy after he swapped Saturday Night Live for cinema, with Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, Coming to America, and more, making gargantuan amounts of money.
It all started with Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs, though, with Murphy’s feature-length debut earning him a Golden Globe nomination for ‘New Star of the Year’. As co-writer Larry Gross noted, the progenitor of the buddy cop action comedy had spent a long time in development, and much of it was geared toward making it a star vehicle for Pryor.
“Basically, everyone in town was dreaming of developing the next Richard Pryor movie,” he explained. “He was hot, and he was cool, and he was new. I mean, the ferocity of people’s enthusiasm for Richard Pryor at that time was really kind of amazing. He crossed that barrier into being artistic and commercial at the same time.” When asked if 48 Hrs was being rewritten with him in mind, Gross’ “exactly” said it all, which Hill additionally recalled being “back in ’78 or ’79.”
However, “Walter was about to do a draft when they found out Pryor wouldn’t be available.” When shooting Stir Crazy in June 1980, Pryor was taken to hospital in a critical condition with third-degree burns on half of his body when he doused himself in rum and set himself alight while freebasing cocaine. By the time he returned to acting when Some Kind of Hero started shooting in the spring of 1981, he’d moved on without 48 Hrs, and 48 Hrs had moved on without him.
In between, Hill’s then-girlfriend, who was also a talent agent, suggested a replacement. “I’ve got this client who you should maybe consider,” Gross remembers hearing. “He was a young guy, never done a movie before, on Saturday Night Live.” That was, of course, Eddie Murphy, and the rest was history.
While Pryor’s near-death incident wasn’t directly responsible for or the sole reason why Murphy was cast as Reggie Hammond opposite Nick Nolte’s Jack Cates, there’s nonetheless an alternate timeline where the script was tailored to his needs, he played the leading role in 48 Hrs, and Murphy’s film career started somewhere else entirely, and who knows how things could have panned out from there.
