When I first heard Netflix was working on a documentary about Eddie Murphy, I think I assumed it would be a multi-part series. After all, Murphy has been around since the early ‘80s, his life has had an extended number of periods, eras, rises, falls and comebacks, and there’s room for a lot of storytelling there.
But Being Eddie, from director Angus Wall, is at feature length, running just an hour and 40 minutes. It features extended interviews with Murphy himself, as well as a long list of comedy A-listers that includes Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle and even the usually-reclusive John Landis.
Being Eddie is going to appeal to people who are interested in revisiting their favorite Eddie SNL bits, as well as the most notable moments from his acting career. But a deep dive, this is not. They can’t all be Pee-wee as Himself.
Being Eddie
The documentary doesn’t really move far off from the general understanding of Murphy’s biography: He grew up on Long Island, taking up comedy as a teenager, something he showed a knack for at an early age, landing him on Saturday Night Live when he was just 19 years old, as the first breakout star of the show’s second decade.
Richard Pryor was his hero, and Bill Cosby admonished him for using too many curse words in his act. And as you may have heard, he and his brother Charlie had a run-in or two with Rick James.
Murphy segued very quickly into movie stardom, with 48 Hrs, followed by Trading Places and Coming to America, making him probably the biggest comedy movie star in the 1980s. (A discussion of this period is soundtracked by “Marriage of Figaro,” the Mozart music that opens Trading Places.)
He delivered the legendary comedy specials Delirious and Raw, the latter of which was released as a film, and then stopped performing stand-up, never to return. He made some ill-fated forays into becoming a singer:
The ensuing decades were marked by highs and lows. Murphy has sometimes endured long runs of flops, interrupted by the occasional comeback in something like The Nutty Professor, Bowfinger, Dreamgirls, or Dolemite is My Name. After David Spade insulted him, in a not particularly funny way, it kicked off a decades-long estrangement from SNL, which finally thawed a few years ago when he agreed to host the show.
Since his hit voice role in the first Shrek, now 25 years ago, Murphy has frequently starred in kids’ fare. And while he teased a return to stand-up, about ten years ago, that never came to pass.
Shallow Depth
All of this is explored in the documentary, but not really with much depth. If you have even a passing familiarity with Murphy, he’s told most of these stories before. The question of whether Norbit alienated the Academy and cost Murphy the Oscar for Dreamgirls is relitigated for about the 500th time.
It doesn’t help that nearly all of the talking-head interviews consist of little insight besides the interviewees effusively praising Murphy to the skies. People also can’t stop mentioning, accurately, that the 64-year-old Murphy has aged very well.
There’s very little shared about his personal life. The only one of Murphy’s wives or girlfriends who is mentioned by name is his current one, and while he shares that his Dreamgirls performance came amidst his past divorce, not much is said about that marriage or his subsequent relationships. He has ten (!) children, but we don’t really meet any of them.
There’s no mention of the controversy in some of Murphy’s past work, especially the lurid anti-gay stuff in some of that early stand-up, which Murphy has acknowledged in past interviews.
And there’s nowhere close to a deep dive into his filmography. Dolemite is My Name, Murphy’s greatest late-period role, is glossed over almost completely.
There are some humorous stories he tells, like the time Yul Brynner invited him for a threesome with his wife, or the time Jesse Jackson took Murphy aside after Coming to America to thank him for giving opportunities to older Black actors, apparently not realizing that was Murphy playing all the parts in the barbershop scene.
In the summer of 2024, Murphy sat for one those in-depth interviews with the New York Times’ David Marchese, which went considerably more in-depth than the documentary does.
