Eddie Murphy

He got on SNL because a January 1981 episode ran five minutes short and someone handed a 19-year-old the gap to fill. The Harlem characters bit worked, and he went from featured player to the reason anyone watched the show. By 1984, Beverly Hills Cop grossed $320 million and held the R-rated domestic box office record for nearly two decades. The role was originally Stallone's. He wanted an action film. Murphy made it a comedy instead, which tells you something about whose instincts were right.

Murphy spent the 2000s making movies he's now happy to mock, collected a few Razzies, and was frank about it: 'I was making shitty movies.' The pivot came with Dolemite Is My Name (2019), which landed a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and reminded everyone what he looks like when a role actually fits. He rejected the comeback framing (nobody leaves anymore, your image stays out there), which is a more interesting position than most stars in the same situation would take. Netflix released a documentary on his career in 2025 and the AFI is giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2026. Whether he's coming back or just refusing to acknowledge he ever left is the question the industry still can't answer.

The role of Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters was written specifically for him and was intended to be much larger. He passed to do Beverly Hills Cop. That turned out fine. More interesting: Section 746 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, banning the use of non-public government information to trade commodity futures, takes its informal name from the plot of Trading Places. His 1983 comedy has a footnote in federal financial law. He also paid for Redd Foxx's funeral in 1991 out of pocket after the comedian died broke. Murphy reportedly grew up doing Foxx impressions in bars at 15. Some debts aren't financial.