I’m not with that ‘turn the other cheek.’ I wish I was.” If somebody calls me a nigger or gets up in my shit, I’ll hit him. King has always been a hero of mine, but I couldn’t be a pacifist the way he was. It was great listening to all that stuff, because it was like I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing. People call me a genius, but he’s the real genius. I would sit in that basement for hours and listen to That Nigger’s Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger and go out and do stuff from those records for my friends. I heard them so much I could recite them backwards and forwards. He’s been through a lot of shit I’ve never had to face. That’s why all these comparisons to Richard Pryor piss me off. The worst tragedy ever to happen to me was when I lost my father. You just get tired of running up against that, the censors telling you, ‘You can’t say that.’ Did you know that Bill Cosby once called me up and told me he didn’t like my act? “On SNL, we probably had more freedom to do and say what we wanted than any other show, and there were still a lot of things we couldn’t do or say. And everybody would say, ‘There goes Eddie Murphy.'” “My people say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to watch out because of who you are.’ But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve always been ‘Eddie Murphy.’ When I was in high school, I used to wear a suit, a shirt and tie with a collar pin, carry a briefcase and have my cashmere coat slung over my shoulder. I’m in a position that allows me to do what I want to do, and I do it.” “I think I have enough of a sense to know what works for me and what doesn’t, without going into some big thing and analyzing what I do.
That’s why I don’t pay any attention to the critics.
“There’s always been a lot of negative stuff written about me. I figured 25 years from now, for their 100th anniversary, when they’ve got a lot more Black faces up there, I’ll be glad to take part in a picture.” It was a historical thing, right? Then I noticed I was going to be the only Black face in the picture. “Remember when Life had that photo session to celebrate Paramount’s 75th anniversary? Just about everybody came-every big star who worked in a Paramount picture, from Elizabeth Taylor to Robert De Niro. Sit down, relax-y ou just might learn a thing or two. This week, we revisit some highlights from our September 1987 interview with Eddie Murphy, as told to the film critic Elvis Mitchell.
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