The one thing Eddie Murphy will never do for a movie: “People are coming to see me to laugh”
TV viewers sitting down to watch the new season of Saturday Night Live in 1980 were completely unaware that they were about to witness history.
This was the first season that a talented and charismatic young star was to join the cast, which would be the first step in his all-conquering goddamn movie career. That young man was, of course, Eddie Murphy.
Since this breakthrough moment on SNL, Murphy has gone on to become one of the biggest names not just in big-screen comedy, but in Hollywood across the board. It hasn’t always been easy for him, but he has now achieved a certain status of untouchability that very few actors have ever even come close to.
In an interview with Collider, Murphy spoke about reaching this point in his career. Knowing that he has the ability to basically ask for whatever he wants, he revealed that there is one line that he will never cross again in the name of entertainment.
“I’m not doing any stunts,” he said. “I’m not trying to do no stunts. You might see other actors, movie stars, do their own stunts and get older, and they still… People are coming to see me to laugh, so it’s not important that I really jump out the window.
“You get the stuntman to jump out the window and do it. I never really do any stunts. I’ll do fight scenes and stuff like that. You have to do some physical stuff so you can tie you into the stunt and make it look like you did it, but I don’t be doing it. I’m not trying to get fucked up on a set.”
You might not think of Murphy as a particularly ‘stunty’ actor, but he’s been through the ringer plenty of times across his career. The Beverly Hills Cop movies were a mixture of action and comedy, with Murphy’s character Axel Foley taking on plenty of intense physical challenges. Stuntman Eddy Donno actually won an award for ‘Best Vehicular Stunt’ for his work on the film. He also goes toe-to-toe with Arsenio Hall in Coming to America, which is a project that nobody expected to have such a well-choreographed fight scene.
Doing one’s own stunts has always been a bone of contention among Hollywood stars. These days, it’s impossible not to talk about Tom Cruise without mentioning the fact that he is still flinging himself out of planes and breaking world records in his 60s. It always looks impressive, but it’s important to remember that stunt performers are highly skilled people who have trained their entire lives for this purpose. There should be absolutely no shame in letting a professional do the job they are meant to do, no matter what Ethan Hunt might say.
Murphy is bang on the money when he says that nobody pays to see him do stunts. He’s a comedian, not an action star, so the idea that he should be asked to do anything dangerous is completely ridiculous. Even if it would have been cool if he’d done all those backflips in Coming to America.
