Murphy Casts Aside His Bad-Boy Image

Outside it’s an unnaturally hot, muggy spring day, but inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel, Eddie Murphy has developed a chill.

“It’s cold in here,” he says quietly, shivering as he settles into a chair to talk about “The Nutty Professor,” the latest movie vehicle for this versatile comedian and the one that’s supposed to revive his sagging cinematic fortunes.

It might just be getting close to the media that’s freezing Murphy up a bit. After all, movie critics and other Hollywood pundits have spent most of the ‘90s suggesting that Murphy’s success in the previous decade went to his head, ruining his comic gifts or at least clouding his judgment.

Murphy was a brash, angry, brilliant teenage comic when he stormed onto “Saturday Night Live” in 1980 and made the show his own. His jump to the big screen was one of those leaps of which Hollywood history is made. Films like “Trading Places,” “48 Hrs.” and “Beverly Hills Cop” turned him into an international superstar and a powerful force in the movie business.

Recently, though, his films have pleased neither critics nor audiences. His efforts to expand his dramatic range and break away from the cocky, smart-guy comedy he became famous for led to such career-crippling failures as “Harlem Nights,” “Boomerang” and last year’s “Vampire from Brooklyn.”

“The Nutty Professor,” a remake of the 1963 Jerry Lewis comedy classic, is being touted as a return to the Eddie Murphy comedies of old, while Murphy himself is sporting a new, low-key public persona. The former hard-partying bachelor is now 35, married (to Nicole Mitchell) and settled into domestic life.

Where Murphy used to travel with an oversized entourage and plenty of attitude, he now shows up to meet the press accompanied by a single bodyguard. He speaks softly, showing none of the glibness of his screen persona.

Asked what are the best things about being Eddie Murphy in 1996, he sounds positively philosophical: “The best thing is the obvious one: My kids are the first ones from either side of my family that weren’t born in the projects. My mother has a house, my grandmother has a house. The best thing about show business is that it enables you to do nice things for people you love.”

Not even bad reviews or lackluster box-office numbers have dampened Murphy’s enthusiasm for what he does. “Things happen to (hack) me off, but I can’t think of anything that takes the wind out of my sails,” he says. “How can you even brood in this business? If you can’t get a good table or you get a bad review or someone says you suck - that’s part of it. I used to work in a shoe store. I used to work in McDonald’s. I can’t complain.”

Murphy wouldn’t complain about having a hit film either, and “The Nutty Professor” is tailor-made for his comic strengths. In the film, directed by Tom Shadyac (“Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”), Murphy plays dual roles: Sherman Klump, a kind-hearted chemistry professor who tips the scales at 400 pounds, and Sherman’s alter ego Buddy Love, a suave ladies’ man whose testosterone levels are dangerously high. Problems arise when the miraculous gene-altering formula Sherman concocts to transform himself into Buddy wears off at all the wrong moments, wreaking havoc on his attempts to woo the pretty new professor next door, played by Jada Pinkett.

The story, Murphy notes, is a combination of “Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde” and “Cyrano De Bergerac.” It’s also the first out-and-out comedy Murphy has done since “Coming to America.” In this film, like that 1988 hit, Murphy displays his remarkable gifts at transformation, playing five other characters from Sherman’s oversexed grandma to a fey white fitness guru who bears more than a passing resemblance to Richard Simmons. The idea for what Murphy calls a “straight-out comedy” came to him two years ago when he was making the lackluster, by-the-numbers sequel “Beverly Hills Cop III.”

“I was going on the set of that movie and looking at the chair that said ‘Beverly Hills Cop III,”’ Murphy recalls. “And I was like, ‘Beverly Hills Cop III’? I don’t want to do this (stuff). I want do something that’s really funny. I don’t wanna shoot somebody or jump over a car.’ That’s where the inspiration came to do this.”

While “The Nutty Professor” contains a good bit of the Murphy comic energy of earlier days, not to mention enough gastrointestinal humor to please every 12-year-old in the audience, the film’s biggest surprise is Murphy’s creation of the Sherman Klump character. In a remarkably realistic fat suit designed by Oscar-winning makeup artist Rick Baker, Murphy literally disappears into the character.

As convincing as the high-tech rubber camouflage is (his makeup took between four and nine hours a day to apply), it’s Murphy himself who brings the mild-mannered fat man to life. This is definitely not the Murphy his fans are expecting - and perhaps not a Murphy they’ll rush to embrace.

But the actor points out that it’s a large part of why he did the movie. “I got to play vulnerability,” Murphy says. “I never played a character who was on the receiving end of abuse before. I think people (will be) surprised because I usually play brash, fast-talking guys with an answer for everything. In reality, I’m just as vulnerable as the next guy.”

Vulnerability, however, is not the quality that’s allowed Murphy to withstand the poor box office performances of his recent films and questions about his comic abilities. The actor, it turns out, has lost little of his confidence. He explains the failure of “Vampire in Brooklyn” in remarkably upbeat terms: “It didn’t do well at the box office, but I like that picture. I pulled off what I wanted to do. I was trying to stretch. But I think that people who follow my movies said, ‘I wanna see him do something funny. I don’t want to see him as a vampire.”’

Murphy says his continuing efforts to broaden his range were a reaction to the film industry’s attempts to limit him as a performer. “When I started making movies there were no blacks in Hollywood,” he asserts, “there was Richard Pryor. When I first came out, they wanted everything to be Axel Foley (the character he played in “Beverly Hills Cop”) - a fast talking con-man. Hey man, that’s not the only thing I wanted to do in this business. Because I had a lot of early success, this gave me the opportunity to try different things.”

Murphy also downplays the significance of “The Nutty Professor” as some sort of crucial comeback vehicle. “My movies have made $2 billion,” he says, “so I don’t approach movies thinking, ‘Oh, this has to be a hit or I’m not gonna be in the business.’ Because I’m an artist. This is what I do.”