Eddie Murphy Improvised All of His Best Lines in the New ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Movie

In the original Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie (Axel Foley) Murphy, John (Sgt. John Taggart) Ashton and Judge (Lt. William "Billy" Rosewood) Reinhold sat in a car for a stakeout “and they would just talk shit,” according to Mark Molloy, director of that film’s upcoming sequel Axel F. “And they told me that a lot of the first film is some of those moments when they were just allowed to sit there and talk to each other.”

So why mess with a good thing? “So much of (Beverly Hills Cop) was improvised,” Molloy told Entertainment Weekly, so he wanted to bring that same spontaneous energy to Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, premiering July 3rd on Netflix. After all, a director would be kind of dumb not to take advantage of working with Eddie Murphy. 

“You’ve got one of the greatest comedians, if not in my eyes, the greatest comedian in the world,” Molloy explained. “A huge part of my job is to create a space for improvisation to thrive. I always want to get what’s on the page, but when you have someone like Eddie Murphy, you want to let him be free.”

But the inability to get things on the page is what took Murphy so long to commit to another Axel Foley movie. (The not-so-beloved Beverly Hills Cop III came out in 1994, an incredible 30 years ago.) In 2015, Murphy told Rolling Stone, “I’m not doing a Beverly Hills Cop unless they have a really incredible script. I’ve read a couple things that look like they can make some paper. But I’m not doing a shitty movie just to make some paper. The shit got to be right.”

Cut to 2023, and Murphy had finally changed his tune, thanks to original producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “I must have read five or six different scripts, and it was never right. The studio was like, ‘Let’s go. Here it is.’ It was like, ‘It’s just not it,’” Murphy told Collider. “Jerry Bruckheimer got back in there, and he knows his shit, and he put it together. He did (Top Gun: Maverick) just last year, and Bad Boys is Jerry Bruckheimer. So we have that same brain behind Beverly Hills Cop, and he put all the pieces in place that were required for us to make a great movie. And I’m excited for people to see it.”

Murphy believes Bruckheimer and company finally got the script right, but Molloy insists that the sequel’s best bits still came from the comedian’s brain. “As I look back on the film,” he promised, “some of the funniest moments in the film is when Eddie is improvising, and the audience loves it.”