After years of avoiding the press, Eddie Murphy gave Rolling Stone a rare interview for their latest issue. In the Q&A, the comedian opens up about the ups and downs of his career over the years, possibly returning to standup, a Beverly Hills Cop TV show and why he’s quitting family movies. Check out some excerpts below.
On Standups
“If I ever get back onstage, I’m going to have a really great show for you all,” he says. “An hour and a half of stand-up and about 40 minutes of my shitty band… But I haven’t done it since I was 27, so why fuck with it? But that’s just weighing both sides. It comes up too much for me to not do it again. It’s like, when it hits me, I’ll do it, eventually.”
Family Movies
“I don’t have any interest in that right now,” he says. “There’s really no blueprint, but I’m trying to do some edgy stuff. And I only want to do what I really want to do, otherwise I’m content to sit here and play my guitar all day. I always tell people now that I’m a semi-retired gentleman of leisure, and occasionally I’ll go do some work to break the boredom up.”
Beverly Hills Cop IV
“They’re not doing it,” he says. “What I’m trying to do now is produce a TV show starring Axel Foley’s son, and Axel is the chief of police now in Detroit. I’d do the pilot, show up here and there. None of the movie scripts were right; it was trying to force the premise. If you have to force something, you shouldn’t be doing it. It was always a rehash of the old thing. It was always wrong.”