Eddie Murphy’s First Time Playing Many Characters

Will we ever get the old Eddie Murphy back? For that matter, when exactly did we lose him? It feels like it’s been so long since we’ve seen Murphy be the singular comedy genius that he is, and it doesn’t help that he most recently was seen getting his time wasted on projects like You People and Coming 2 America. The fact that Coming 2 America was such a shallow dud is especially depressing, considering that the original Coming to America is not only one of his greatest artistic triumphs, and a touchstone for African American culture, but is also the birth of one of Murphy’s longstanding trademarks: playing multiple characters using prosthetics and makeup. One could argue that this is actually where his career starts to decline, as he became increasingly addicted to and reliant on this practice in order to cover up for how lacking the material of his subsequent films was. In other words, it became a dried up cliché of his own making.

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The Brilliance of ‘Coming to America’

The story of Coming to America is about Akeem (Eddie Murphy), prince of Zamunda, and his trusty servant Semmi (Arsenio Hall), traveling to Queens, New York in order to find true love, a woman who excites both Akeem’s loins and his intellect. Along the way, they both encounter a colorful cast of eccentric weirdos, most of whom are played by Murphy and Hall under lots of prosthetics and costumes. In Murphy’s case, he plays Clarence, a loud barber who makes up bold claims about the celebrities he admires and hates; Saul, an old white Jewish man who constantly calls Clarence out on his BS; and washed up local musician Randy Watson, leader of the band Sexual Chocolate.

This would have been a huge swerve for audiences at the time, as Eddie had never played multiple characters before, not even on SNL. It came about due to the influence of director John Landis, who told Collider in an interview, “I had read this article, that I was really offended by, about Jewish comics in blackface… I thought it was really ignorant, so I just said, ‘Eddie, I’m gonna have you play an old Jew.” So when they put Murphy in his Jewish man makeup, not only did it suit him well but “we discovered was that the makeup freed him. Once he was in the makeup, he was just as fresh as when he was 19. Once he was in the makeup, he wasn’t Eddie anymore.” Murphy caught the bug for this type of performance so quickly, that they then came up with the other characters to capitalize on it.

Needless to say, Eddie Murphy is a revelation in this mode. It’s beyond cliché to say you’d never know he was Saul or Clarence or Randy unless you already knew, but it really is impressive how diverse they each feel. Murphy shows such a full range of emotionality and his voices are each so distinct from each other, that he makes these men feel so comfortable in their own skin (even Randy, who is delightfully clueless in what a loser he is). It also speaks to the diversity that Murphy could have had as a real actor, to go from authentic Jewish smart aleck to self-important bragadocious old-head to delusional entertainer so smoothly. Eddie in his younger days was such a giving performer, not eating up the scenery and playing his characters in a manner that could be called sincere if not truly “serious”; he felt like a character actively involved in a scene, rather than a standup doing bits. But therein lied the problem.

Murphy’s Comedy Became More Self-Reliant on Gimmick

In total, Eddie Murphy has played multiple characters in a film six times, including Coming to America, with results that range from delightful to downright abhorrent. Vampire in Brooklyn was a misfired attempt at horror-comedy where he played a vampire with a bad Eurotrash accent, a preacher with skin so plastic it made him look like a melting chocolate bar, and a white gangster who looked like a Michael Jackson painting getting the Dorian Gray treatment. The Nutty Professor is a film I have strong nostalgia for, I still find it to be one of Murphy’s better films in terms of the comedy aging well and him being able to imbue his acting with actual sincerity. Besides the infamous scene where he plays the entire Klump family while they have dinner and keep farting, all the characters feel like tangible people presenting consistent behavior. There’s a scene where Sherman gets consoled by his mother that’s some of the most tender acting Murphy has ever done, and it’s him acting with himself! The less said about the sequel, the better; it was more of the same, but not in a good way.

While Bowfinger has the status of a cult classic by now, it’s somewhat underrated in terms of what Eddie Murphy does in it. Not only is he a stroke of genius as a nebbishy dweeb like Jiff, one of the few characters in film history to plausibly pull off the “I’m so embarrassed I’m looking at a naked girl” joke, but Murphy does something quite clever with his Kit Ramsey counterpart: make fun of his own reputation as a movie star. There are countless stories of Eddie Murphy being a giant egomaniac who let success get to his head in his glory days in the 1980s, not to mention being very unpleasant to work with, and Kit feels like a steroidized version of what Murphy was really like. Whether it’s conscious commentary on his part or not, and despite it feeling occasionally like the Murphy one man show going off the rails, here it’s appropriate for him to do so, since he’s supposed to be an obnoxious hothead surrounded by yes people. It also shows that Murphy still had his innate comic gifts and that he could be hilarious without needing all the prosthetics and hiding in plain sight shtick.

‘Norbit’ Ruined Everything

Which is why it’s so painful and telling that Norbit was the last time he tried doing that shtick. A film so terrible in its execution, and so offensive in its portrayal of its characters and attitudes towards people, and Murphy was so widely shamed for his involvement in the film, that it contributed to his gradual recession from filmmaking. On Marc Maron’s popdcast WTF, he explained, “I was making shitty movies…maybe it’s time to take a break.”. While Murphy has never explicitly mentioned his use of prosthetics or explained why he stopped doing that until Coming 2 America, you have to imagine that the baseline misery of making bad films that don’t involve heavy prosthetics and makeup would be only exacerbated by the inclusion of those stressors.

The real issue with Murphy’s decline wasn’t simply with the prosthetics, as he was usually assisted by Oscar-winning makeup legend Rick Baker, so even on his worst projects like Norbit, the makeup and prosthetics are still doing their share of the work. The actual issue was that the more Murphy did it, the more he relied on stereotypical and rehashed ideas. He continuously relied on regressive African American behavioral tropes to fill in hollow characterization, and considering his history in stand-up comedy with Delirious and Raw, you could argue that he was projecting some of his own toxic attitudes and beliefs onto these characters. Combine that with how overbearing his insistence on being in the center of the spotlight became, how every character as an excuse for Murphy to riff and get loud in ways that didn’t suit a scene at all, and it became painfully shrill.

Not to mention that, when you close your eyes and just listen, you realize he doesn’t actually have that many voices in his repertoire. His voice work as Donkey in Shrek is the end result of him using that same voice for Papa Klump, the preacher in Vampire in Brooklyn, and he even did a female version of it for Rasputia in Norbit. Mama Klump sounds reminiscent of his work in Mulan, even Randy Watson sounds like Sherman Klump’s brother Ernie. Being a genius doesn’t make you unlimited, and it seems Murphy was banging against the walls of his shortcomings. Thankfully, it seems he’s finally found his groove again.