Eddie Murphy Found Out His Idol Hated Him

“He’s the best ever,” Eddie Murphy once told Playboy about his idol, Richard Pryor. “There’s no one who’s ever brought the theatrics that Richard brings to his comedy. Anyone who tells you he’s into comedy and doesn’t think Richard is the best comedian who ever existed doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Pryor is better than anyone who ever picked up the microphone and started telling jokes. Nobody can fuck with him.”

Growing up, there was no one Murphy looked up to more. And while they say you shouldn’t meet your idols, it was all love the first time Murphy met Pryor. “When I was on a fucking plane coming from Georgia, Richard Pryor was on the plane. That’s when I first met him,” Murphy told The New York Times last year. The young comic gave Pryor a copy of his first album on an audio cassette, then returned to his seat a few rows back. “I was watching the back of his head, and he was laughing at my stuff. I could have died right there. You could have crashed the plane right there. To make Richard laugh for real? You don’t see Richard laugh a lot.”

But things went downhill once Murphy’s career reached greater heights. He’d wanted to do a project with Pryor for years, he told Spike Lee in a 1990 Spin interview, and finally got tired of waiting. “I said, ‘Well, fuck it, I’ll just do the shit myself.’” Murphy proceeded to write his first complete screenplay, Harlem Nights, as a vehicle for him, Pryor and Redd Foxx to star in together. 

Did I mention it wasn’t a comedy? And that it was the first (and not coincidentally, the last) time that Murphy ever directed a movie? 

“There were just too many different hats to be wearing the same time for the first time,” Murphy told Lee. “I just wanted to direct — just to see if I can do it. And I found out that I can’t, and I won’t do it anymore. And the biggest thing is I didn’t enjoy doing it.”

But the worst part was working with his childhood idol. “Richard wasn’t the way I thought Richard was gonna be,” Murphy confessed. “I thought it would be like a collaborative thing where I would get to work with my idol, and then it would be like, ‘This is great.’ But Richard would come to the set, say his line and leave, it wasn’t like a collaborative thing.”

It was worse than that: Pryor didn’t like him. The reason, at least according to Murphy: Pryor seemed to blame the younger comic for his declining career. “He thinks I’m the reason why his shit ain’t the way it used to be,” Murphy explained.

Pryor’s primary motivation for doing Harlem Nights was to get “a big payday out of it,” Murphy said. That hurt, considering that young Murphy “used to have more Richard Pryor pictures up than Elvis Presley. And after I worked with the brother and I found out shit, and you meet people that are around him, know him, and the two camps meet, and people start talking, it’s like, Oh shit. And it’s real weird to find out your idol hates you.”