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Eddie murphy raw i want half7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Murphy – who came up with the idea, and the title, for the blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, which Keenen Ivory Wayans eventually directed in 1988 – takes a much warmer, more reverent approach to Rudy Ray Moore, a star of the blaxploitation era. Asked how his sense of humor has changed, he conceded: “I’m mushier than I used to be.” But there’s a new tenderness and mature vulnerability in this role that also comes out in person. With a soft voice and laid-back manner, he can seem remote, until he switches into a character, which he does often raising his volume and intensity, he commits, firmly in the moment.Īs is clear from his performance in Dolemite, one of his finest, Murphy’s star power is undiminished. He remains blindingly quick on his feet and an ingenious, hilarious mimic who can summon a big top of characters in seconds. Murphy describes himself now as a completely different person than he was back then, but spending an hour with him argues otherwise. “It’s forever,” he said quietly in what might be considered a verbal shrug. With alacrity he returned to the measured voice of Eddie Murphy, unflappable superstar, recognising that what is a portrait of a place and time for him means something altogether different to everyone else. “That’s a bit much, my goodness,” he said, cracking up, then shifting again, taking his voice down an octave to register a hint of moral disapproval: “My word.” Wearing a plush zip-up jacket with sunglasses hanging off the front, Murphy leaned back and shifted from a cool monotone to a comic impression of himself watching Raw as a snooty prude. “I was a young guy processing a broken heart, you know, kind of an asshole,” he said. ![]() The cocky jokes about women and relationships remind him, he said, of a breakup he was going through back then. For when Murphy is flipping channels on television and stumbles across Raw, he cringes. It’s an intimidating legacy to live up to, particularly when you feel a bit alienated from the cackling, strutting star who defined a certain kind of wiseguy cool. When I saw Raw in Washington as a teenager, the audience laughed so loudly that the people running the cinema actually turned the film off and asked us to be quieter. No one killed like Murphy did in the 1980s. It's difficult for a comic to be funny and sexy or funny and sweetly innocent, but nearly impossible to pull off this trick at the same time, as he did in seminal bits like the one about kids excited over the ice cream truck. Replace Murphy with anyone else in Beverly Hills Cop, the third-highest-grossing comedy of all time, and it's probably a flop.īut even these credits don't entirely capture his singular success. In the meantime, he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world after a string of blockbuster comedies (48 Hrs, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop) fueled by his singular charisma. Besides entering the discussion of who is the greatest cast member in the history of Saturday Night Live and injecting a cutting racial consciousness into a show that lacked it, his dynamic presence arguably saved SNL from cancellation when it was struggling after the original stars left.īeverly Hills Cop: Murphy is synonymous with the film, the third-highest grossing comedy of all time. In two specials, Delirious and Raw, performed, famously, in leather suits, he became the most influential stand-up of his generation. It’s hard to overstate how big an impact Eddie Murphy made in the 1980s. That way, when I finally just sit on the couch, then it’s good.” “I’m kind of looking at this period as a bookend,” Murphy said. ![]() And 30 years later, Murphy is working on a sequel, also directed by Brewer, to his 1988 hit Coming to America with the original characters. In December, two months after the October 4th cinema premiere of Dolemite (it moves to Netflix on October 25th), he's hosting Saturday Night Live, for the first time since 1984 (before that he was a cast member for four years). His return to stand-up will be part of a broader reboot of the decade that made Murphy a star. ![]()
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