Nobody saw Eddie Murphy cry onscreen for the first time: “People had walked out”
In the last five decades, audiences have seen Eddie Murphy do a lot of things on-screen, but crying isn’t often on the menu.
Sure, the Beverly Hills Cop icon has shed a tear in a funny way a couple of times, such as in the regrettable TV-to-film adaptation I Spy. At one point in that dismal update of an old Bill Cosby show from the 1960s, the less said about that, the better, Murphy sits back-to-back with Owen Wilson and goes into full kid mode, bawling his eyes out like a six-year-old who has just been told to share his favourite toy dinosaur with his sister.
Is it funny to watch a grown man like Murphy cry like a small child? Yes. Sort of. Although it’s not as side-splitting as watching Robert De Niro turn on the waterworks in Analyze This, which gets extra points for being so darn absurd.
In truth, because Murphy is primarily a comedic actor, sobbing in a realistically vulnerable way has never been high on his to-do list. In fact, it took until 2016, when he finally turned up in a drama – the critically derided Mr Church – for him to try his hand at playing a human being with the full range of emotions. Naturally, the press seized upon this, as the world loves few things more than watching to see if a comedian embarrasses themselves when they try to go ‘serious’. However, Murphy didn’t see what the big deal was. After all, he cried on-screen more than a decade earlier, and nobody said boo – because nobody saw it.
“There was a big cry scene in Pluto Nash, but I think people had walked out of the theatre by the time they came out,” Murphy told the Pocono Record while laughing himself silly at the thought of people missing his big moment. “They walked out before the big cry scene. I cried my ass off and y’all missed it!”
Now, you may be asking yourself a question at this point, and it’s perfectly understandable: what in the blue hell is ‘Pluto Nash‘? Well, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, a 2002 sci-fi action comedy, is the reddest of red-headed stepchildren in Murphy’s career, and that’s saying a lot considering he once went more than a decade without making a good movie.
Released the same year as I Spy (which looked like a masterpiece in comparison), Pluto Nash was eviscerated by critics, and with a $7.1million box office total on a budget of $100m, it wound up with the dubious distinction of being one of the biggest money losers in Hollywood history. Even Murphy admitted the movie was a fiasco from start to finish, and there are probably only a handful of people in the world who ever made it to the end, either in cinemas or at home. Heck, his own eight-year-old son, Myles, the apple of his eye, witheringly declared the film “corny” after they watched it together.
Disappointingly, Murphy has never spoken about Pluto Nash‘s big crying scene, nor how he prepared for it. Crying on command can be a tricky thing for actors, of course, and there are differing schools of thought on how to generate those eye droplets. For example, did Murphy just slather a menthol stick under his eyes or pop in some eye drops? Did he access a traumatic memory that triggered an emotional response? Did he use his imagination to put himself in the space boots of Pluto Nash, thereby relating to the true emotion of the character at that point in the story?
Or (and I really hope this is the answer), is there a possibility that he went to the Joey Tribbiani school of acting, which entails cutting a hole in your pocket, sticking a pair of tweezers down there, and just starting to pull?! Alas, we’ll probably never know for sure.
