The role Eddie Murphy will always regret playing: “The movie was horrible”
Hollywood stars love showing their range. Ultimately, no one wants to be associated with only one kind of role, or feel like the industry is constantly funnelling them in one direction. These people are artists, and they contain multitudes! Take Eddie Murphy, for example, a comedic icon who believes he has treated audiences to the full spectrum of his abilities across his rollercoaster career.
Now, this might sound like a vaguely absurd contention for Murphy to make. The man has predominantly made comedies in his career, and most of them have leaned heavily on his usual bag of tricks; his ‘Eddie Murphy-isms,’ if you will. The broad grin, the fast-talking patter, the iconic laugh, a propensity for burying himself under prosthetics, and an overall air of coolness, even amid the silliest situations, are all Murphy’s stock-in-trade.
However, if you were to tell Murphy that this means he doesn’t have as much range as other stars, he would shoot you down as fast as the words left your mouth. “I did everything,” he claimed to Vanity Fair in 2020. “That’s another thing as an actor, I’ve done it. Black or white, no one’s done this. I’ve played everything from an old lady to a donkey—literally—and everything in between. Middle-aged women, old Asian people, an old Jewish guy, and I even played a spaceship once!”
Indeed, the incredible thing about this quote is that it’s all true. Throughout his career, Murphy has always loved burying himself under prosthetic makeup to play all manner of zany characters of all shapes, sizes, races, and creeds. It could be argued that much of what he did in Coming to America and The Nutty Professor wouldn’t fly in the modern cultural landscape, and that’s probably for the best. Still, when it wasn’t considered culturally insensitive for an actor to don a fat-suit to play an old lady or be transformed into an elderly Jewish barbershop customer, Murphy was there with bells on.
Still, the absolute best part of Murphy’s claim to a range other stars could never even aspire to is that he did truly play a spaceship. In 2008’s disastrous sci-fi ‘comedy’ Meet Dave, Murphy portrayed a spacecraft controlled by 100 miniature aliens whose exterior was fashioned in the shape of its captain. So, in essence, it was Murphy with tiny people running around inside his body. Sounds like a laugh riot, right? Wrong.
“The movie was horrible,” Murphy chuckled. “I play an actual spaceship. It was that movie, Meet Dave. Once again, the movie wasn’t shit, but I did play a spaceship.”
Murphy was so disappointed in his stint as a human star vessel that he refused to attend the Meet Dave premiere, giving the excuse that he was already shooting A Thousand Words and couldn’t make it. However, this was torpedoed ever-so-slightly by director Brian Robbins, who made both films, finding the time to attend.
Then, as his final word on the matter, Murphy told the Critics’ Choice Awards that he often uses Meet Dave as a cautionary tale to imbue sage wisdom on the next generation of actors. “That’s the one thing,” he grinned. “When young actors come up to me on the street and they say, ‘Do you have any advice?’ I say, ‘Never play a spaceship.'”
