Being Eddie

The Lion in Winter, Watching MTV

I always get wary when a living legend invites cameras into the house. Usually there's a product to move, a legacy to buff, or at the very least an ego that wants feeding. With *Being Eddie*, Angus Wall's 2025 Netflix documentary, I'm still not convinced what the real motive is. Maybe it's the giant production deal hovering over everything. But there is something disarming about watching a 64-year-old Eddie Murphy shuffle around a gothic mansion with a retractable roof as if it's just another Tuesday. He doesn't come off like a man making a comeback pitch. He looks more like somebody who already built the kingdom and sees no reason to prove it again.



Wall, the editor behind some of David Fincher's most tightly wound films, gives this documentary an unexpectedly easygoing pulse. Instead of hammering us with prestige-doc momentum, he lets scenes breathe. Murphy sits in his extravagant living room, relaxed to the point of near-idleness, and talks in a slower register than the old live-wire version of himself trained us to expect. He's framed not by clips of his past glories, but by those old ventriloquist dummies sitting around the room. The image is almost too neat: the man who voiced Donkey, the Klumps, and half a dozen other people in one body, surrounded by wooden figures who don't speak at all.



The sequence I couldn't stop thinking about is the one where Murphy casually explains his routine from the couch. He doesn't spend his nights revisiting the hits. He falls asleep to reruns of MTV's *Ridiculousness*. Then, with a completely straight face, he compares the show to the cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Wall edges the camera in just enough to catch the little crease by Murphy's eye, and the moment sits there in perfect uncertainty. Is he serious? Is he messing with us? The documentary becomes most alive in that ambiguity. It suggests the brain is still delightfully strange even if the body is taking it easy. Jim Vorel at *Paste Magazine* got close to the film's best mode when he called it "a casual hang with Murphy as he guides you through various moments of his life, with varying levels of honesty and candor."



The talking heads supply most of the overt reverence Murphy himself avoids. Jamie Foxx, whose own career has jumped between comedy, music, and drama in a very Murphy-like way, points out how introverted Eddie can be. He remembers him sitting at the back of packed Hollywood parties with a Coca-Cola, just observing. You can see that reserve in the interviews here. Kevin Hart and Pete Davidson buzz with nervous excitement when they talk about his influence, while Murphy barely seems to disturb the air around him. The documentary also preserves a great petty detail: he says he made *The Nutty Professor* out of spite after David Spade joked about him on *SNL*. It's funny, small, and oddly revealing. Even now, when he tells the story, you can feel a little stiffness return to his shoulders.

Whether the film is too clean about the rougher years depends on how much mythmaking you can tolerate. Murphy doesn't linger over the failures or the grief. Still, there is something unexpectedly moving about watching the loudest, fastest guy in the room finally make peace with quiet.