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Rarely does Eddie Murphy sit down for in-depth interviews these days, much less invite the general public into his mansion home to peel back the curtain on his life. That’s why many were delighted to hear that the reclusive “Raw” comedian is finally the subject of a long-overdue documentary that does just that in Netflix’s “Being Eddie.”
For the first time, the film, which arrived Nov. 12, shows Murphy looking back on his unprecedented career in entertainment, recalling his meteoric rise from a “Saturday Night Live” breakout to a stand-up superstar to a box-office sensation that delivered all-time classics across several decades.
Although the doc is as intimate as a 103-minute runtime allows to recap a nearly 50-year journey, “Being Eddie” is still a gratifying look at how one man — a Black man in Hollywood at that — reached the upper echelons of fame and success and lived long enough to tell his own story, even if it’s a truncated version.
The documentary begins by recalling Murphy’s childhood and start in comedy before turning into a highlight reel of his iconic filmography. In between, friends and peers like Arsenio Hall, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Dave Chappelle, Jamie Foxx, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Tracy Morgan and more all appear as talking heads to fill in their own stories of the comedic legend.
