Eddie Murphy crashed through a glass ceiling of Hollywood stardom with Beverly Hills Cop

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There’s a brief moment early in Beverly Hills Cop where Axel Foley, a resourceful and gleefully disrespectful young Detroit police officer, walks down a Hollywood street and passes two guys dressed in shiny vinyl suits. Foley takes a second and laughs to himself. It’s not a vicious laugh, exactly. It’s more of a happily disbelieving thing. Where Axel Foley is from, people don’t dress up like Michael Jackson on a Tuesday afternoon. He’s just enjoying the cultural whiplash of it.

That’s our one real clue that Axel Foley is not the same person as Eddie Murphy, the guy playing him. Eddie Murphy was already rocking those shiny vinyl suits. He’d worn one in his HBO stand-up special Delirious a year earlier. Axel Foley might’ve been a fish out of water in Los Angeles, but Eddie Murphy was already making sure that everybody knew he was a star.

Murphy was 24 years old when he showed up in Beverly Hills Cop. He’d already spent four seasons on Saturday Night Live, almost singlehandedly keeping that show alive during the bleak early-’80s stretch when Lorne Michaels and the original cast had all left. Murphy had started on SNL as a teenager, and his charisma was obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. Soon enough, he became famous enough to guest-host an SNL episode while he was still in the cast.

Murphy was on SNL when he made his first two movies: 48 Hrs. in 1982, Trading Places a year later. Both films were major hits, and both popped almost entirely because of Murphy, who mercilessly stole them from his older and better-established white co-stars. In Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy didn’t have to worry about a co-star. Every other actor in the movie might as well be a coat rack. It’s the Eddie Murphy show, and the Eddie Murphy show was what people wanted to watch.

In retrospect, Murphy’s lightning-fast come-up is an amazing thing to consider. Black movie stars on his level simply didn’t exist before him. Up until the mid-’80s, big blockbuster films were almost invariably about white people. The movies in this column have been wildly monochromatic. West Side Story and Billy Jack, the two biggest hits of their respective years, were at least nominally about people of color, but those people were mostly played by white actors. Blazing Saddles did have a black hero, and it did use America’s history of racism for its own anarchic purposes, but its star, Cleavon Little, never got a chance to become a big name beyond that one film. Murphy was a true exception.

Murphy was not the first black movie star, but a singular figure in film history. In the late ’60s, Sidney Poitier had become one of Hollywood’s biggest names, but he’d done it by playing upstanding young men in issue-driven dramas like Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In The Heat Of The Night. Richard Pryor—one of the screenwriters of Blazing Saddles, and one of Murphy’s biggest inspirations—is a closer precedent. Pryor was capable of turning a movie like Stir Crazy into a major hit, and he had the same affable-libertine unpredictability as Murphy. But Pryor didn’t have the electricity or sex appeal. Murphy’s closest peers weren’t actors; they were pop stars like Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom had huge years in 1984.

Beverly Hills Cop stumbled into its star in a coked-out haze. Paramount president Michael Eisner and partied-out producer Don Simpson both claimed that they’d had the idea for Beverly Hills Cop in the late ’70s. The script spent years in development, going through different writers and stars. First, Mickey Rourke was going to play the lead. Then, it was going to be Sylvester Stallone, who rewrote it as a straight-up action movie that sounds a lot like what Cobra became. (Stallone wanted to rename the lead character Axel Cobretti.) According to legend, Stallone quit the film after a big argument over which kind of orange juice he’d have in his trailer. Producers Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer hired Murphy only a few weeks before production was supposed to start. It’s the happiest accident possible.

Murphy’s style meshed well with the Simpson/Bruckheimer aesthetic, which was still in its infancy. Simpson and Bruckheimer had only produced one movie together at the time: Flashdance, which retold Rocky, recasting Rocky Balboa as a sexy woman who could dance. Flashdance became the No. 3 highest grosser of 1983. In a lot of ways, it’s the first true ’80s movie—the first box-office success that fully embraced the early-MTV aesthetic. Flashdance is all about oiled-up bodies and neon lights and montages cut to pop songs. It’s not a good film, exactly, but it’s a fun spectacle.