Eddie Murphy is reflecting on puzzling career advice he received from Sidney Poitier.
The Beverly Hills Cop star recalled an interaction that he had with the legendary In the Heat of the Night actor in the new documentary Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood. “They were talking about doing Malcolm X,” the Coming to America star explained. “Norman Jewison was putting it together. They were gonna use The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. And they approached me about playing Alex Haley.”
Murphy was still considering the offer when he crossed paths with Poitier. “Around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something, and I asked him, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking about playing Alex Haley!'” he remembered. “And Sidney Poitier said, ‘You are not Denzel, and you are not Morgan. You are a breath of fresh air, and don’t f— with that!'”
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Poitier was comparing Murphy to Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, who were both finding their footing as Hollywood leading men around the same time the Trading Places star burst onto the scene in the 1980s. “I didn’t know if it was an insult or a compliment,” Murphy said of Poitier’s comment. “I was like, ‘What?'”
Jewison ultimately cast Washington, with whom he’d worked on 1984’s A Soldier’s Story, as the legendary civil rights activist in Malcolm X before Spike Lee took over the project’s directorial reins. Lee’s film, which was released in 1992, did not include Haley as a character, but used his Autobiography as its primary source material.
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Murphy later speculated on why Poitier viewed him as a different kind of movie star than Washington or Freeman. “I was in uncharted waters. For Sidney and all those guys, when I showed up, it was something kinda new,” he explained. “They didn’t have a reference for me, they couldn’t give me advice, ’cause I was 20, 21 years old, and my audience was the mainstream — all of everywhere. My movies [were] all around the world, and they had never had that with a young Black person. So nobody could give me advice, really. Everything broke really big and really fast.”
Murphy noted that another iconic entertainer did try to give him more career advice, however: James Brown. “He told me I should stop cursing,” Murphy said, laughing. “He said, ‘You wanna be in this business for a long time? Stop that cursing.'”
That wasn’t Brown’s only advice. “And he said, ‘You think you got a million dollars?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do,'” Murphy recalled. “He said, ‘You ain’t got no million dollars.’ He said, ‘If you do got a million dollars, you take it and you bury it in the woods.’ I said, ‘Why would I bury my money in the woods?’ He said, ‘Cause the government will take it from you, so bury it.’ I was like, ‘But can’t the government take your land?’ And he said, ‘But they won’t know where the money is.'”
“That’s a true story,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of advice I used to get. We didn’t have a lot of elders.”
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Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood is now streaming on Apple TV+.
