Eddie Murphy Reveals He’s Only Been on One Audition in His Entire Career. What Was It For?

Among his generation of stars, Eddie Murphy had an especially atypical Hollywood trajectory. At 19, he became only the second Black not-ready-for-prime-time player on Saturday Night Live (after original cast member Garrett Morris), and two years later, in 1982, he launched one of the most successful big-screen runs in Hollywood history.

The star of hits like 48 Hours, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America discusses his unusual career in the new two-part Apple TV+ documentary Number One on the Call Sheet. Episode 1, “Black Leading Men in Hollywood,” was directed by Reginald Hudlin (who worked with Murphy on the 1992 film Boomerang), and in addition to Murphy, it also features interviews with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx and Will Smith.

In the documentary, Murphy, 63, says his success was almost a foregone conclusion — at least in his own head.

“Early on, I just knew I was going to be fa — I started when I’m around 16, I’m going, ‘I’m gonna be famous,’ ” Murphy says.

A vintage clip from 1981 is shown next, and in it, a young, baby-faced Murphy makes a bold prediction. “I wanna get, I would say famous by the time I’m 21,” he says. “I’m 19 now. I give myself two years.”

His breakthrough role — in his very first film — would come the following year, and apparently, Murphy so impressed on SNL that he didn’t even have to audition for that role as a rookie cop opposite a top-billed Nick Nolte.

“When I was 19, I got Saturday Night Live, and things just started happening. I didn’t go through all of the stuff that a lot of actors, I didn’t got through auditions,” Murphy says. “I had one audition in my whole life. I think I’m the only actor that could say that. I had one audition. It was for Saturday Night Live.”

Nice work if you can get it, and Murphy got a lot of it pretty easily in the decade that followed. With his fast success came advice from several of his Hollywood elders. Sidney Poitier, for one, discouraged him from playing Roots author Alex Haley in director Norman Jewison’s planned adaptation of Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes told him, “Don’t forget where you came from,” and Godfather of Soul James Brown told him to stop cursing and to bury his millions in the woods.

“And I said, ‘Why bury my money in the woods?’ ” Murphy says in the documentary. “He said, ‘The government will take it from you. So bury it.’ And I said, ‘But can’t the government take your land?’ And he said, ‘But they won’t know where the money is.’ That’s a true story. That’s the kind of advice I used to get.”