Eddie Murphy on why he finally said yes to a fourth ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ film
Written by ABC AUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED on January 20, 2023
(NOTE LANGUAGE) Fans of the franchise were both excited and surprised to learn last year that Eddie Murphy will be back as the titular wisecracking Detroit detective in Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley nearly 30 years after his third big-screen adventure.
However, as Murphy tells Collider, it wasn’t supposed to be this long between films. “[W]e tried for years and years, maybe 10, 12 years, and I must have read five or six different scripts, and it was never right,” Eddie explains. “The studio was like, ‘Let’s go. Here it is.’ It was like, ‘It’s just not it.'”
Eddie credited the legendary Jerry Bruckheimer, the series’ original producer, with getting Axel back on the beat.
“When he got involved, and he started developing the script, and he knew what Beverly Hills Cop was supposed to be. When he got back involved, that’s when it all started to come together. Because Jerry Bruckheimer got back in there, and he knows his s***, and he put it together.”
Murphy continues, “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.”
Inception‘s Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zola‘s Taylour Paige have also been cast in the film, as have original series stars Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Bronson Pinchot and Paul Reiser.
The movie is currently in production, but the plot is still under wraps.
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
