Eddie Murphy: I said that? You can die again and again. But I've been making movies for so long that now it's all just one body of work. If you have a flop movie, so what? And if you have a hit movie, it's "so what," too, it's on to the next movie. If I do something and I die in it, at least I took a chance. There's this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn't want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that's part of it.
Brian Hiatt: When your career hit its first bumps at the end of the Eighties, people seemed eager to say you were washed up.
Eddie Murphy: You have to remember, there was no hip-hop back then, or hip-hop was still novelty music, and for years I'm the whipping boy. Anybody that wanted to vent, I was the one. I got a lot of shit that wasn't fair. The root of it was racist. If I was rubbing you the wrong way, at the core of it was some racist shit: "Look at this arrogant nigger, two thumbs waaaay down" [laughs]. Then I wasn't helping, either. I wasn't giving no humble pie: "Fuck y'all, suck my dick, motherfucker!"
Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview / by: Brian Hiatt / November 9, 2011
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