SimplyAbuDhabi XLVIII

‘I love myself’: Eddie Murphy’s recipe for Hollywood stardom B y T h e I n t e r v i e w P e o p l e D espite Eddie Murphy’s long and successful career, fame and success have left him curiously, even miraculously, unscathed. “He has great seats to life,” says his friend and protege, Dave Chappelle. “The core of him seems unchanged by it”. Murphy is fuelled by self-belief. Soft-spoken, though not especially bashful, the talent who brought us The Nutty Professor and Vampire in Brooklyn sees himself as a transformative figure in African-American history – an equal to Barack Obama and heir to Mohammad Ali’s message that black people could rise just as high as their white counterparts. He also compares himself to Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Prince – great talents from similarly humble backgrounds who achieved things black people of previous generations could never have imagined possible. But he is also aware of just how different he is: all those artists contained within their genius the seeds of their own destruction. Not Murphy. “My biggest blessing is not my comedic talent. It is that I love myself and I knew what I wanted to do really, really early”, he tells Being Eddie director Angus Wall (a film-maker who designed the famous clockwork map title sequence from Game of Thrones). “That’s why I didn’t fall into any traps. At the root of it all I love myself”. He talks about the stabilising influence of his stepfather, Vernon Lynch. In 1970, Murphy’s mother married Vernon, a part-time boxer who taught his stepsons when to punch and when to put up their guard. “It’s a sweet blessing to have a man like that come into your life,” Murphy says. “The example that he set… I feel I’m the man I am because of him”. More than just another funny man, Murphy has been a show business fixture for so long that it is striking to reflect on how young he was when he broke through. As a teenager, he started performing in clubs around his native Long Island, a stone’s throw from NewYork City. Aged 19, he successfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live – a training ground for young talents such as Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, who would later star opposite Murphy in one of his big eighties hits, Trading Places. Such was his talent that he had soon left sketch comedy behind. One of the first to recognise that Murphy could be something more than just another funny man was young producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who, as president of production at Paramount, pushed for him to be cast opposite Nick Nolte in buddy comedy movie 48 Hours. “The first two weeks of 48 Hours, they wanted to fire me because they thought ‘this isn’t working’” Murphy says. “And [Katzenberg] came to them saying ‘No, don’t fire him, there’s something there’, and they didn’t fire me and we’ve just been cool since”. If 48 Hours made him famous, then 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop turned him into a mega-star. In 1988, he released one of his best-loved films, Coming to America. The tale of a naive African prince who travels to NewYork seeking a wife was, he reveals, inspired by his own search for love. “It would be nice to meet a girl who didn’t know I was one of the faces [i.e. a celebrity]”, he says. “That’s how the Coming to America idea started”. The Netflix documentary Being Eddie is an absorbing film, but it never pushes Murphy outside this comfort zone. It is the story Murphy wants to tell – and Murphy comes across as introspective and self-aware. He sees himself not just as a comedian, but as a creative force moving through the world at his own pace. “I don’t force anything,” he says of his life and his career. “It’s not a rowboat, it’s a sailboat. I’m not trying to be or trying to get to. I just am”. Simply Abu Dhabi | 127