The role Eddie Murphy will always regret not playing: “Now I’m too old”
Many actors in Hollywood have their regrets, and Eddie Murphy is certainly no exception.
As one of the biggest names in the industry, Murphy has definitely had his share of successes and shining moments. However, he’s also experienced ups and downs when it comes to popularity and box office hits, especially when you look at how his excessive streak across the 1980s eventually slowed down throughout the 1990s, when the Beverly Hills Cops somehow morphed into the Boomerangs.
Even his attempts to rehash old flames seemed to fall flat, especially when you look at how projects like the third instalment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise didn’t capture a semblance of the magic of the first one, and people found it difficult to look past rumblings that it was nothing more than commercial pandering.
However, more often than not, Murphy saw these moments as a learning curve, opting to instead place his efforts and energy elsewhere so that he wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes. That said, learning and growing on the job doesn’t mean immunity to regrets down the line, and Murphy certainly knows what it’s like to look back and wonder how things could have been.
For instance, like many of his peers, Murphy has a few regrets when it comes to roles he turned down, with three in particular that’ll always be in the back of his mind. “I was supposed to do Ghostbusters, and didn’t do that,” he said, “And Rush Hour, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Those are my big three, ‘wish I would have done’ movies. They were huge, giant hits. They were giant hit movies.”
Another that he’ll always regret is not getting more involved in a James Brown movie when he had the chance – something that he feels that he can’t do now because of his age. As he reflected to Billboard, “Dreamgirls, I loved being in that. But then when they were trying to get together that James Brown movie thing together, I was thinking about doing that, but now I’m too old.”
He added, “I’m 52. I can’t do no splits — even if I look like I could do one. I wish I’d been at the show when James Brown did his last split. There had to come a time when James realised, ‘I can’t do that split no more. That’s the very last split there.’ I bet James called a meeting after, and said, ‘There ain’t going to be no splits no more! You’re going to have to double up on the cape thing!’”
To his credit, Murphy’s had enough crossover with the Godfather of Soul to have paid his dues. His impersonations on Saturday Night Live, for instance, have become major moments broadly cited as some of the best skits in the show’s history, especially the famous hot tub party scene, plus another elsewhere that he included as part of his stand-up film, Delirious.
Because of his impersonations, people had thought that he was the person for the job, were there ever a big, Hollywood James Brown biopic in motion, and, although the pair briefly discussed as such once, time eventually introduced the issue of Murphy’s age, and he also worried that he wouldn’t do it justice because he’d focus too much on being funny than being accurate.
Instead, Dreamgirls was as close as he got to playing the soul legend on screen. In the film, he plays James “Thunder” Early, a character he based heavily on Brown, becoming a major favourite across awards season as well as earning him some of the best reviews and reception of his entire career. Clearly, there was magic there to begin with, even under the layer of seemingly meaningless comedy.
