Eddie Murphy shared stories about his interactions with Prince during a visit Friday to The Tonight Show, where the actor also talked returning to Saturday Night Live, turning down Ghostbusters and hanging out with Johnny Cash and Marlon Brando.
Murphy, talking to Jimmy Fallon one night before his long-awaited return to SNL, first reminisced about an impromptu roller skating sessions with Prince that Tonight Show drummer Questlove also attended.
“This is like 2 or 3 in the morning, we go to Prince’s house and he says ‘Who wants to go roller skating,” Murphy recalled. “We went to this roller rink at like 3 in the morning,” adding that Prince had a pair of light-up roller skates.
Murphy then shared another story, “Where I live now, Prince stayed a couple houses down. My chef was leaving at like 2 in the morning once and a car goes by — purple car, loud music, Prince — a hubcap falls off and the car keeps going. He picks the hubcap up and it has the Prince thing on the hubcap. The car goes and makes a big U-turn and comes back and Prince says, ‘Could I have my hubcap back?’”
(Murphy, however, did not discuss the late-night basketball game that featured in one of Chappelle Show’s most memorable sketches.)
Fallon then asked Murphy about the truthiness of some of the “Eddie Murphy folklore stories,” including the one that the actor turned down Ghostbusters; Murphy admitted that scheduling problems were to blame because he was working on Beverly Hills Cop at the time.
“The only movie that I turned down that became a big hit was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I was gonna be the Bob Hoskins dude and I was like, ‘Animation and people, that sound like bullshit to me,’” Murphy said. “Now every time I see it, I feel like an idiot.”
Murphy also set the record straight on his early stand-up days alongside Jerry Seinfeld, dinners with Marlon Brando and his massive Elvis Presley memorabilia collection.
With Murphy back hosting SNL for the first time in 35 years, he reminisced about his SNL audition and one of the show’s infamous afterparties in 1981 where he hung out with Johnny Cash. “Johnny Cash said to me, ‘You going to the afterparty, Eddie? June and I sure do love you’”:
Also during the interview, Murphy talked about his return to stand-up and revealed his iconic Delirious red leather suit has been destroyed:
Source: Read Full Article