Eddie Murphy Says his Dream Project is an R&B Mockumentary

Eddie Murphy was famously awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 2022, but it’s clear the 63-year-old actor—or as he prefers to be characterized, a “supersensitive artist”—still has a lot of milestones he’d like to hit. In an new interview, the star of upcoming Netflix film Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F says that he’s always wanted to make a very specific “fake documentary,” to the point that he even made a trailer for the as-yet-unmade film.

The revelation comes in an interview published Saturday in the New York Times Magazine, a conversation ostensibly supporting the July 3 release of the fourth film in the 40-year-old Beverly Hills Cop franchise. “We’ve been trying to develop another Beverly Hills Cop since ’96,” Eddie Murphy says, after John Landis-directed Beverly Hills Cop III failed to meet the star’s expectations. “It didn’t have the emotional hook that the other ones have,” Murphy says. “I didn’t think the movie came out good.”

“There’s been ten different scripts and a bunch of different producers,” for a fourth Cop film, Murphy says. “We just tried for years and years, and it wouldn’t come together until we got Jerry [Bruckheimer] back involved, the original producer. Jerry, he understood it the most because it’s his movie, and it all came together.”

Murphy has long expressed dissatisfaction with the film industry, telling Vanity Fair in 2020 that he “was just so burnt out on the process of making a movie that if I was a little boy I would start crying.”

The issue, he said then, was “the process of being on set in the movies, at the level that I was making movies from a really young age, and to be doing it constantly. Just the whole sitting in the trailer and waiting.”

Not much appears to have changed for the star in the intervening four years, as he tells interviewer David Marchese, “I never had joy” during the filmmaking process.

“The actual being in a scene, that’s a small part of the day. I love that — when we’re on the set and you feel it clicking. But ‘hurry up and wait’: That’s the movie business, and it is not fun.”

Though he’s the recipient of numerous awards, Murphy also lampoons those ceremonies, telling Marchese, “The most horrible energy in the world is a room full of famous people going through their whole famous thing: who’s the most famous and who’s cool and who’s not. I hate that feeling.”

Murphy, who says that his work in The Nutty Professor is some of his greatest (“I can’t think of another person that could do Nutty Professor,” he says), seems most engaged when talking about a film he has yet to make. “This one thing I’ve been threatening to do for years called Soul, Soul, Soul,” he says. “It’s like this fake documentary that I love.”

“It’s a Zelig kind of thing, where it’s this guy who’s part of the rock’ n’ roll, R&B thing back in the ’60s and worked with everybody; all these great moments, and he’s attached to all of these things,” Murphy says. He got as far as creating a trailer for the film, even showing it to writer, actor, and musician Donald Glover. “He was like: ‘Yo, you got to make this movie. How do we make this movie?’” Murphy says.

And yet, Murphy has yet to pull the trigger on production, though “I’ve been right to where I was going to make it and then said, ‘No, not right now.’” The issue, Murphy says, is that he feels “like it’s so self-indulgent, and only a few people would go see it — but they would laugh so hard.”

And also, there’s Murphy’s aforementioned frustration with the process of filmmaking. Even for a dream project like Soul, Soul, Soul, “it’s so much work,” Murphy says. “That’s been the deterrent. But I tell you, one day, I’ll do it.”