How Eddie Murphy Got His Groove Back

Image credit: Saturday Night Live: Everett Collection

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It has had to, since, in recent years, Murphy has rarely spoken publicly for himself. For more than a decade, he has turned down nearly all requests for print interviews (including this story). According to people who know him, that's both out of deep shyness and because he feels he's been mistreated by the press. Inevitably, his reclusiveness has created some distance between him and the audience and allowed others to tell his story, not always to his advantage. It's hard to know exactly how Murphy himself sees that story. But according to one of his longtime friends and frequent collaborators, screenwriter David Sheffield, it has played out almost exactly the way he imagined it would from the very beginning. ''Eddie once said, back at Saturday Night Live, before any of this happened, ' I'm going to be a big star, a huge success. Then I'm going to have some troubles, and I'm going to have to make a comeback. Then I'll make a comeback and everybody will like me again.' And he called it.''

He was just a kid in 1980, 19 years old, when he was cast on Saturday Night Live, but he already had years of experience getting laughs. Raised in a solidly middle-class home on Long Island by his mother and stepfather — his father had died when he was 8 — Murphy had been performing stand-up since the age of 15 and had developed a brazen sense of confidence bordering on cockiness. Even when he was just a hungry young comic hustling to make a name for himself, recalls good friend Arsenio Hall, he had no qualms about walking out on a gig that had him warming up the audience for some corny white-bread singer like Melissa Manchester if he felt like it wasn't his crowd. ''Eddie was fearless,'' says Hall, who befriended Murphy on the stand-up circuit. ''He didn't give a f---…. He knew who he was and wasn't willing to compromise. People who say, ' Oh, he changed when he got rich and famous' — no, he didn't. Even when he was no name at all, that motherf---er was pretending his coat was a cape.''

When Murphy arrived on Saturday Night Live, the show was struggling to recover from the departure of its original cast, and this skinny young kid barely out of Roosevelt High School, with his effortless charm, lethal talent for impressions, and streetwise attitude, stepped into the vacuum. A host of instantly iconic characters spilled out of him: Mister Robinson, the ghetto answer to Mister Rogers; the pompadoured pimp Velvet Jones; the bitter, green showbiz hack Gumby; the mush-mouthed, nimbus-haired former child star Buckwheat, singing ''Unce, Tice, Fee Tines a Mady.'' There seemed no limit to his talent. ''Eddie could just sit there riffing and say 10 funny things,'' says Sheffield, who, along with Barry Blaustein, became one of Murphy's go-to writers on the show, a partnership that would continue through movies like Boomerang, Coming to America, and the Nutty Professor films. ''If you were wise, you'd follow him around with a tape recorder.''

Before he'd even finished his second season, Murphy was cast opposite Nick Nolte in the action movie 48 HRS., playing a fast-talking convict, a role originally written for Richard Pryor. Just weeks into shooting, though, Paramount executives began fretting over Murphy's performance and summoned director Walter Hill to a meeting to discuss replacing him. (Former Paramount head Michael Eisner denies such a meeting took place.) ''They didn't think he was funny,'' Hill says. ''He wasn't giving a broad comedic performance. They wanted somebody who'd do it like Richard. Eddie was different.'' Murphy himself once explained the difference to Sheffield this way: ''Richard always plays the scared guy. I'm the mean motherf---er.''