Eddie Murphy is opening up about some advice Sidney Poitier once gave him that left him surprised.
In Apple TV+’s new documentary, Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood, the Beverly Hills Cop actor shared that the Oscar winner told him not to star in 1992’s Malcom X. At the time, the film was initially being helmed by Norman Jewison, Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night director, who cast Denzel Washington in the lead role before Spike Lee took over as director.
“They were talking about doing Malcolm X,” Murphy recalled. “Norman Jewison was putting it together. They were gonna use The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. And they approached me about playing Alex Haley. Around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something, and I asked him, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking about playing Alex Haley!’ And Sidney Poitier said, ‘You are not Denzel [Washington], and you are not Morgan [Freeman]. You are a breath of fresh air, and don’t fuck with that!’”
Murphy admitted he “didn’t know” if Poitier’s advice “was an insult or a compliment,” but was just shocked to be compared to Washington and Freeman. “I was like, ‘What?’” he added.
Elsewhere in Black Leading Men in Hollywood, Murphy speculated as to why Poitier didn’t put him in the same group as Washington and Freeman.
“I was in uncharted waters. For Sidney and all those guys, when I showed up, it was something kinda new,” the Dreamgirls actor said. “They didn’t have a reference for me, they couldn’t give me advice, ’cause I was 20, 21 years old, and my audience was the mainstream — all of everywhere. My movies [were] all around the world, and they had never had that with a young Black person. So nobody could give me advice, really. Everything broke really big and really fast.”
While Lee’s Malcom X didn’t include Haley as a character, the film ended up being a huge critical success, earning two Oscar nominations: best actor for Washington and best costume design for Ruth E. Carter.