“I was a kid when I made that movie,” says Murphy, now 59, Zooming with Parade from the home he shares in Los Angeles with his fiancée, Paige Butcher, 41, and their two children, Izzy, 4, and Max, 2. “I’m a completely different human being than I was.” (Murphy also has eight other children and one grandchild.) The original John Landis–directed Coming to America, “was like a grown-up fairy tale,” he says. “Even though it had an all-Black cast, the movie’s not about race. It’s about true love, and so it was accessible to everybody.” It was based on a character Murphy conceived when, he explains, he was feeling heartbroken over an ended engagement and began imagining the story about a prince searching for true love. Enter Prince Akeem Joffer from the fictional African nation of Zamunda, so weary of being surrounded by yes-women, he sets off and finds romance in the one place in America fit for a future king: Queens. “The new movie,” says Murphy, “tests that happily-ever-after.” Coming 2 America picks up three decades after the first. Opening in a royal castle in Africa, Prince Akeem (Murphy) is about to become king when he’s thrilled to discover he has a son he didn’t know about living in America—in Queens, New York. So, naturally, Akeem sets off to find him. In addition to donning the Prince’s regal robes again for the sequel, Murphy also reprises his original multiple roles—as Rick James–ish soul singer Randy Watson, My-T-Sharp barbershop owner Clarence and Clarence’s old Jewish customer, Saul. Murphy is joined onscreen by familiar actors from the first film, including James Earl Jones as Akeem’s father, King Jaffe Joffer; Shari Headley as Akeem’s wife; and Arsenio Hall as his trusted confidante, Semmi. Being back on set with everyone “was kind of like if you saw a bunch of people you went to high school with, all of a sudden,” says Murphy. The new film also features plenty of fresh-faced newcomers, including Jermaine Fowler as Akeem’s long-lost son, Lavelle; Wesley Snipes as his nemesis, General Izzi; and Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones and Tracy Morgan; plus some delicious ’80s-inspired cameos. What took this sequel so long—some three decades—to come to life? “Well, it’s a trilogy, and part three comes when I’m 90,” jokes Murphy. Actually, he says, as quotes and bits from the first film worked their way into the culture—“The very first ‘mic drop’ was Randy Watson in Coming to America,” points out Murphy—it finally felt like time to bring the story back to life with a current twist. “A guy finds out that he has a baby he didn’t know about? That’s a contemporary dilemma. Trust me, I know.” He laughs. And for a film focused on extending its noble family, it feels fortuitous that one of Murphy’s kids discovered through 23andMe that the Murphys are the same paternal line as Pharaoh Ramesses III. “We’re descended from a pharaoh in Egypt!” he says with a wide grin. “That’s fly.”
Born Funny
Murphy’s modern lineage began in Bushwick, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where he was raised—along with his older brother, Charlie—by his mother Lillian, and his father, Charles. “I had a great upbringing,” he recalls. “Most of my childhood memories are fond. It was pretty normal kid stuff.” It wasn’t all easygoing, however; his parents divorced when Murphy was a toddler, and five years after that, his father, a transit police officer, was murdered in a crime of passion. And when Murphy’s mother became too ill to care for her two boys, they spent a year in foster care while she healed. She then married Vernon Lynch Sr.—who became Murphy’s “Pops”—and when young Eddie was 10, the family moved to Roosevelt, Long Island, for the remainder of his childhood. But despite the hard times, his humor thrived. “I was always funny,” he says. “I grew up around a bunch of funny people.” He was only about 8 years old the first time he made strangers laugh, from the back of a bus coming home from the swimming pool. “Every time the bus stopped, whoever got off the bus, I would start talking, like, doing what that person was saying and where they’re going, and like a voice for that person,” he recalls. “I was doing it loud enough and the whole bus was laughing, and it went on for like a half hour. Then when I got off the bus, the whole bus clapped.” Murphy became an avid fan of Richard Pryor’s comedy albums. And while it didn’t necessarily make him want to be a comedian, he says, “It made me go, ‘That’s what I am.’ You know? That’s who I am.” But his parents weren’t supportive of the path. “Back then it was kind of like if you wanted to be a comedian, that was like wanting to be a magician or a juggler!” he says, laughing. “So yeah, they weren’t receptive.” Murphy pursued it anyway. By age 15, he was doing standup at Long Island comedy clubs and bars. His most famous bit at the time? “Boogers,” he says with a big laugh. “It was the guy digging in his nose, and trying to get a booger off his finger, and all the sticky stuff—that was my killer bit at 15.” He was also doing impressions of Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell and Jimmy Carter. “That’s how long ago it was,” he says with a chuckle. “I had a Jimmy Carter impression.” After high school, Murphy attended Nassau Community College “for a hot second,” he says, as a theater major, for about a semester. Disillusion set in when for a college production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he was denied the chance to audition for the starring role of McMurphy (made famous in the movie by Jack Nicholson). “They wanted me to play the Scatman Crothers role [the orderly, Turkle], and I was like, ‘Because he’s the only Black dude? I want to play the lead!’ I remember thinking, This is bulls–t. I would crush it! I was so pissed off.” Six months later, he was cast on Saturday Night Live. “I went back there,” he jokes with spiteful delight, “‘Yaaa, yaaa, yaaa!’”
Fast Track to Fame
With years of standup already under his belt (“and a really good memory for dialogue,” he says), Murphy quickly made his mark on SNL playing now-classic characters, including Gumby, Mister Robinson and Buckwheat. “I couldn’t have been in a better place than SNL—that’s the Harvard of comedy schools,” he says. From there, his career soared—fast. Within a two-year period, while still doing that late-night series, he also starred in Trading Places, 48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and made his red leather-suited debut in the breakout HBO comedy special Eddie Murphy: Delirious, which he followed up four years later with the record-breaking Raw. He then began dipping his toes in family films like The Nutty Professor, Dr. Dolittle and the wildly successful Shrek franchise, for which he’s been voicing Donkey since 2001. And along with comedies like Bowfinger and Tower Heist, he also revisited some of his early hits with sequels and threequels. By 2007, Murphy had earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Dreamgirls, but his spirit for filming features was waning—and in the comedies, he felt it was showing. “You can fake like you’re crying, and you can fake like you’re angry, but it has to really be funny,” he says. “There’s a tiny little energy as I’m saying something funny, as it’s coming out of my mouth,” he explains, “where I know this is going to make them laugh when I finish this sentence. And if you don’t feel that, then it’s not there.” Which is why, around 2011, he took a six-year break to press reset. During that time, his fiancée, Butcher (together for 10 years, they’ve been engaged since 2018), gave birth to his two youngest children, and he was able to spend even more time with his family. “Most of my kids are big grownups now,” he says of his other children: Eric, 31 (with Paulette McNeely); Bria, 31, Miles, 28, Shayne, 26; Zola, 21; Bella, 19 (with ex-wife Nicole Mitchell); Christian, 30 (with Tamara Hood); Angel, 13 (with former Spice Girl Melanie “Mel B” Brown). His granddaughter, Evie, 1, is his son Miles’ child. When Murphy began working full-time again, he only chose projects that fully engaged him. “And that’s why Dolemite turned out the way it turned out,” he says of the 2019 biographical drama Dolemite Is My Name, based on 1970s blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore—a film that earned Murphy acclaim from critics, a Golden Globe nomination and groans from his mom for the character’s crude language. “I said, ‘Ma, it’s a good movie!’” He laughs. “She hadn’t seen me talk crazy like that in years.” That refreshed sense of enthusiasm also led to getting onto the SNL stage for the first time in more than 35 years, this time as host, which he calls “a storybook moment,” as it finally earned Murphy his first Emmy.
Thinking Positive
Today, Murphy sees his future much as he did when he was a teenager. “Positivity, creativity, forward motion,” he says of the words that guide him now. “Those three things pretty much cover everything. Whenever things get crazy, if you go back to that, you get grounded.” He swears his favorite thing to do is just sit on the couch, watch TV and do nothing. “I could do that forever,” he insists. But he’s likely more often channeling his positivity and creativity in some interesting fashion—like walking around the house with one of his guitars (usually his acoustic Martin) and playing every day. “I’m always, always writing a song,” he says. “I don’t want to say it’s a passion—I don’t want to sound pretentious or artsy because it’s not. It’s just every now and then a song will pop out of the ether.” The ones he records are purposely a far cry from his “Party All the Time” 1985 hit single. “I don’t want people thinking that I’m that guy,” he groans. His latest release was the 2013 reggae track “Red Light” with Snoop Dogg. Looking ahead, he’s proud that Coming 2 America will finally see the light of day, after getting bumped twice off its planned 2020 theatrical release date, and then a change in distributors. After spending nearly three years co-writing the script, he hopes fans will see “we did this lovingly,” he says, with everyone involved doing their best to capture the comedic spirit of the first film. Murphy is still working on his first standup special in nearly 35 years, which he refuses to allow COVID-19 to sideline. “Let me put it this way: You don’t necessarily need a live audience there to do standup,” he says. “When I did Delirious and Raw, we shot two nights and then one night where there’s no audience—and you can’t tell which shots I use where there’s no audience.” So he’s now exploring a similar tack. After that, he plans to join Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito for the Twins sequel Triplets, and then shoot Beverly Hills Cop 4. “I’m just optimistic,” he says of 2021. “Everything’s fresh and new, and everything’s resetting.” He is focused, as always, on making sure his family is taken care of and that he lives up to his responsibilities. “But I’m not afraid of that,” he says with that grounding positivity. “I’m not afraid of anything. I’ve had such a charmed life.”
Murphy Must-Haves
Guilty pleasure food: “Jelly Bellys. I could eat a jar. But I pay the price after I eat them.” Secret talent I haven’t done publicly: “No one’s ever seen me play piano. I started playing piano up at Saturday Night Live. There was a piano up there and Joe Piscopo showed me how to play ‘Let It Be,’ and for three years, that’s all I played. I could play the s–t out of ‘Let It Be’!” Reading: “Make Your Life Worthwhile by Emmet Fox. Get this, it’s really good.” ’80s movie I wish I’d been in: “Ghostbusters. I was supposed to be in Ghostbusters. We were doing Trading Places and Dan Aykroyd was like [in a Dan Aykroyd voice], ‘This movie Ghostbusters…’ But then Beverly Hills Cop came along. I wish I could have been in both, but I did Beverly Hills Cop instead of Ghostbusters.” How I stay healthy: “I used to exercise, but the last five or six years, I’ve been really a couch potato. [But] I have a pretty healthy diet, and I don’t drink and I don’t smoke tobacco.” Favorite song: “‘To Sir With Love’ with Lulu singing. When I hear that song, it’s like a big burst of nostalgia. I get all those feelings you’re supposed to get when you hear a great song. [Singing] Those schoolgirl daysof telling tales and biting nails are gone… It makes you want to jump out the window. When I would go to sleep, maybe when I was in my 20s, I would have that movie playing really light in the background because every now and then, they would start a scene off with this string arrangement and it was the most soothing thing ever.” The impression I can’t do: “Oddly enough, I can’t do an Australian accent. Paige and I have been together for 10 years. She’s from Australia, we have two kids, and I hear an Australian accent every day…and I can’t get it, for some reason.” What always makes me laugh: “It’s not one thing, it’s a lot. I’m receptive. I’m open to that always. And I have a good laugh at least every day.” Next, The 25 Best, Funniest Comedies on Netflix Right Now
