Eddie Murphy’s hostility towards Saturday Night Live was so strong that he swore he’d never return to the show he said was run by “dirty motherf---ers.”
Murphy first revealed last June that he was “hurt” by the “racist” joke David Spade made about his career on SNL in 1995. But in the new Netflix documentary Being Eddie, out Wednesday, Murphy said the intensity of his aversion to the show was much more severe. The SNL alum rose to fame during his tenure there from 1980 to 1984, before he became a worldwide movie star. By the time Spade made a crack about a recent critical flop at the time, Murphy was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and the first Black one.
That bit made Spade’s joke feel all the more pointed, Murphy says in the doc.
Being Eddie spans Murphy’s career from his earliest beginnings and features interviews about Murphy’s impact from Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Jamie Foxx, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jerry Seinfeld, John Landis, Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, Michael Che, Pete Davidson, Tracy Morgan, Arsenio Hall, Brian Grazer, and more. Murphy gets personal throughout the doc, despite his seemingly limitless star power—and one of those moments is his take on Spade’s joke.
“Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish,” Spade said from the “Weekend Update” desk at the time. “You make a Hollywood minute omelet, you break some eggs,” he added.
“I just had Vampire in Brooklyn come out,” Murphy says in the doc, as a clip of the segment rolls. “The audience there said ‘Boo’ and hissed at him for saying it, right? So I was like, hurt. My feelings was hurt. It was like, ‘Yo, I’m from the same... It’s like your alma mater taking a shot at you—at my career, not how funny I was, calling me ‘a falling star.’ If there was a joke like that right now, and it was about some other SNL cast member, and it was about how f---ed up their career was, it would get shot down.”
Murphy told The New York Times podcast The Interview last year, “I thought that was a cheap shot, and I thought—I felt it was racist.”
Spade revealed that Murphy called him up after the segment aired, writing from his memoir in 2015, “It was so much worse than I had imagined,” he continued, “I wanted to apologize, explain the joke, anything, but nothing came out. Here was one of my favorite comedians of all time ripping me a new asshole. I had worshipped this dude for years, knew every line of his stand-up. And now he hated me. Like, really really hated me.”
“It was horrible. I didn’t hate him. Of course not. He just got caught in friendly fire and my deep desire to make an impression on my bosses and keep my job. How pathetic. I took my beating and then he hung up,” Spade also wrote.
Murphy says in the doc that it was how many people at the show had to approve the joke that upset him, more than any specific beef with Spade himself. “The joke had went through all of those channels that the joke has to go through, and then he was on the air saying, ‘Catch a falling star.’ So I wasn’t like, ‘F--- David Spade.’ I was like, ‘Oh, f--- SNL. F--- y’all. How y’all going to do this s--t? That’s what y’all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherf---ers.’ I was like that. And that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”
But then, after more than two decades, Murphy eventually let it go.
The doc shows behind the scenes footage of Murphy’s return to the SNL stage to host its 2019 Christmas episode—following a very brief and joke-free appearance at the 40th anniversary special in 2015. “I was like, you know what? F--- this. SNL is part of my history,” he says, “I need to reconnect with that show because that’s where I come from.”
“That little friction that I had with SNL was 35 years ago,” he goes on. “I don’t have no smoke with no David Spade. I don’t have any heat or none of that with nobody.” Murphy says he returned to the show after thinking, “Hey, let me go on SNL and smooth that all out, and I did.” The doc shows footage from Murphy’s first meeting as a guest before the week’s show. “It was surreal… I was thinking, ‘Wow, this office feels smaller.’”
“I think Lorne wanted him to do something that was a little bit more personal because people just wanted him to hear him talk,” Michael Che says in the doc. “I think he was a little cautious of doing a monologue.”
Chris Rock says of his appearance on the show for Murphy’s episode, “I remember Lorne calling me, ‘Come down.’ I thought he was about to tell me Eddie had canceled and they wanted me to host.”
Adds Kenan Thompson, “He just took his shoes off and respected the house, if you will. He just jumped in.” Murphy’s 2019 episode drew almost 10 million live viewers and became SNL’s highest-rated episode in over a decade at the time.
Asked whether Being Eddie truly captures the real him, Murphy told Entertainment Weekly that the film contains “the only time ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, in 50 years of this business, in 50 movies, where you really see me for a split second. You get a glimpse of me totally vulnerable… It’s enough that you feel it, and it’s the first time they caught me on camera. That’s what I get when I watch.”
