Although he's been a fixture in Hollywood since his days on Saturday Night Live in the '80s, Eddie Murphy hasn't really done all that much in the last handful of years. Where has he been? And what has he been up to? As it turns out, he's been living life like the rest of us.
He made a whole bunch of flops
Murphy's big-screen career has always been a bit of a roller coaster, from huge hits like Beverly Hills Cop to The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which remains one of Hollywood's biggest bombs. Still, the last decade has been especially unkind to Murphy, thanks to starring roles in a number of back-to-back flops including 2007's Norbit, for which he "won" three Razzie Awards.
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He followed Norbit with a string of Razzie-nominated turns in films like Meet Dave, Imagine That, and A Thousand Words, all of which made his Oscar-nominated comeback in 2006's Dreamgirls feel like a squandered opportunity. Even his biggest hit of the bunch, Tower Heist, underwhelmed, compared to some of Murphy's previous successes.
To his credit, Murphy has become a bit more reflective in recent years, going so far to admit that some of his career choices may not have been pitch-perfect. "The [paycheck] movies are over for me," he told The Washington Post in 2015.
He dropped out of hosting the Oscars
Murphy made headlines in November 2011 when he announced he would no longer be hosting the 84th annual Academy Awards, set to air the following February. His decision didn't exactly come as a surprise; it was announced a day after that Brett Ratner, the director of Tower Heist, had dropped out as the telecast's producer after making anti-gay remarks and discussing his s£x life on Howard Stern.
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Still, Murphy's decision to quit the Oscars didn't sit well with everyone, especially among members of the Academy. "It was a career mistake," one member told The Hollywood Reporter. "What the hell was he thinking?" "This is like a big middle finger to the Academy and to the industry," said another. Of course, considering how tepid his replacement Billy Crystal's reviews turned out to be, perhaps he dodged a bullet after all.
Mr. Church was too built up
There was significant buzz surrounding Murphy's return to the big screen after a four-year hiatus with the indie flick Mr. Church. The Hollywood Reporter even stated that Murphy would be "promoted for awards consideration in the category of the best-supporting actor." He ultimately wasn't nominated, and the movie came and went with a whimper, garnering zero love from any of the major awards shows.
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However, the critics didn't leap at the chance to lay the blame Murphy's feet. In fact, The Los Angeles Times even gushed that Murphy delivered "a meticulously composed performance." So what was the problem? According to Richard Brody of The New Yorker, the film was "repugnant for its dehumanizing view (however unintentionally so) of a black man, and repugnant for its emptying-out of one of the great black performers of the time into a sanitized symbol of acceptable blackness."
But perhaps the most telling thing about Mr. Church—the hype surrounding it as well as the criticism of it—is how Murphy himself felt about the movie. In Brody's review, he quotes an interview Murphy did with The New York Times in which he said of Mr. Church, "It was like a really easy movie to go do, and everybody was really cool, so I just went and did it, then I went back to the hammock in the back yard." In other words: Murphy isn't taking his acting career too seriously anymore, and neither should anyone else.