Eddie Murphy recounts having a close encounter with Yul Brynner and his wife in his new documentary, Being Eddie.
“My 21st birthday party, I had at Studio 54,’” Murphy, 64, recalled in the doc, which hit Netflix on Wednesday, November 12. “Yul Brynner, 10 Commandments, he was with his wife and he was like, ‘How would you like to go back to my apartment with my wife and I and party?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, I’m cool!’ And I realized as I got older, his wife was smiling. Did he want me to go f*** his wife?”
Murphy joked that as he’s “thought back on” the moment over the years, he wishes he would have taken the King and I star up on his offer.
“The story would [have] ended better,” he quipped. “You know, ‘Yeah, I went back to Yul Brynner’s and f***ed his wife, and he was watching me going, ‘Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!’” (Brenner died in 1985 at 65 after a battle with lung cancer.)
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Murphy went on to clarify that while “nobody had as much fun” as he and his friends did in the ‘80s, he was never interested in taking his partying to the next level. Instead, the comedian would take note of when drugs appeared during a particular get together and move on.
“When I hung out with Rick James and them in the ‘80s, when I would see certain people in the room and you know it’s getting ready to go down … I just bounced,” he claimed. “I was never curious about it. I never wanted to go in there and check it out, nothing. I just wasn’t with it.”
Jamie Foxx echoed Murphy’s sentiment, saying in an interview for the documentary that his longtime friend has never been the type of person who spent their time “dominating” the room.
“He’s very introverted,” Foxx, 57, explained. “He’ll sit in the back of the room with a Coca Cola.”
The Beverly Hills Cop star’s biggest childhood heroes couldn’t even tempt him to partake in illegal substances. In Being Eddie, which features Murphy revisiting his decades-long career in Hollywood, the comedian recalled going to a blues bar with Josh Belushi and Robin Williams during his first year at Saturday Night Live — when he was just 19 years old – where the pair “put some blow on the table.”
“And I’m standing there, with these two heroes, I wasn’t even curious,” he continued. “I was just not with it.”
Murphy insisted that he has never “tried” or even “touched” cocaine in his life, doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. He added with a laugh: “I never even smoked a joint until I was 30 years old!”
Murphy previously opened up about his encounter with Belushi and Williams during a 2024 episode of the New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast, calling the pair “cautionary tales.” (Belushi died of a heroin overdose in 1982 at the age of 33. Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63.)
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“I wasn’t taking some moral stance. I just wasn’t interested in it. To not have the desire or the curiosity, I’d say that’s providence,” Murphy said of his aversion to drugs despite their prevalence. “God was looking over me in that moment. When you get famous really young, especially a Black artist, it’s like living in a minefield. Any moment something could happen that can undo everything.”
Being Eddie is now streaming on Netflix.
