Eddie Murphy revealed that he once received some career advice from Sidney Poitier.
Already a superstar comedian and movie star, Murphy had thoughts about playing his first dramatic role, and Poitier shocked him with the way he responded.
“Early on, Sidney said — I don’t know if it was an insult or a compliment, or something,” he begins. “It was like… They were talking about doing Malcolm X. Norman Jewison was putting it together, and they were gonna use The Autobiography of Malcolm X by [Roots author] Alex Haley,” Murphy recalled on an episode of Number One on the Call Sheet. “And they approached me about playing Alex Haley.”
“And some-kind-of-where around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something,” Murphy continued. “And I asked him, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking about playing Alex Haley.’ And Sidney Poitier said [imitating Poitier’s Bahamian accent], uh, ‘You are not Denzel, and you are not Morgan. You are a breath of fresh air. And don’t f— with that.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ “
Along with Poitier, Murphy also received some wisdom from “The Godfather of Soul” James Brown. Murphy, who parodied Brown during his legendary run on SNL, remembered Brown requesting him to remove profanity from his act and even got some financial tips.
“And James Brown told me, he asked me, he told me I should stop cursing. He said [imitating Brown’s raspy voice], ‘You want to be in this business for a long time, you should stop that cursing.’ And he said, ‘You think you got a million dollars?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And he said, ‘You ain’t got no million dollars.’ He said, ‘If you do got millions of dollars, you take it and bury it in the woods,” Murphy laughed.
“And I said, ‘Why bury my money in the woods?’ He said, ‘The government will take it from you. So bury it.’ And I said, ‘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. That’s the kind of advice I used to get,” he added.
The “Beverly Hills Cop” comedian went on to explain that his meteoric rise to fame as a young, Black actor was a brand new phenomenon in the industry.
“I was in uncharted waters,” he says. “For Sidney and all those guys, when I showed up, it was something kind of new. They didn’t have a reference for me.”
Years later, Murphy earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor category for a dramatic role in Dreamgirls in 2006.
Number One on the Call Sheet premieres March 28 on Apple TV+.
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