The Heat Is On, Again: The Oral History of Axel Foley
With the ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ reboot hitting Netflix, Eddie Murphy and friends dive deep into the backstory of the comedy star’s most iconic characterThe Heat Is On, Again: The Oral History of Axel Foley
With the ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ reboot hitting Netflix, Eddie Murphy and friends dive deep into the backstory of the comedy star’s most iconic character
Would the uniform still fit? Thirty years after the last time he wore it, Eddie Murphy had to be convinced. If you’ve seen the Beverly Hills Cop movies, you know the look: blue jeans, white Adidas, Detroit Lions jacket.
“It was surreal when you put it on again and look at it again,” Murphy tells me. “They kind of had to talk me into wearing the same clothes. Because I was like, ‘Why would he have on the same clothes from 30 years ago? I have the same sneakers?’ And they were like, ‘Can you get your hair the same way? Yeah, you grow a little Afro like you had back then.’ I was like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with y’all? I’m not doing anything!’”
Murphy is 63 years old. He thought that the razor-sharp wiseass detective he first played back when Ronald Reagan was president should dress his age. But the producers of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the fourth installment of the blockbuster franchise, changed his mind. After all, he realized, Axel Foley is an icon.
“They kind of talked me into it,” Murphy says. “They were like, ‘Hey, listen, this character’s look is kind of part of his whole thing. Axel Foley has that jacket. It’s like Indiana Jones’s hat.’ And when they put it like that, it was like, ‘OK. All right.’ And it worked out.”
Though Hollywood has changed radically since the original Beverly Hills Cop—the reboot, out Wednesday, is available only on Netflix—Axel’s story remains the same: He’s a fish out of water trying to survive in the ritziest part of Los Angeles. “He doesn’t have a cape, he doesn’t fly, his hair isn’t perfect,” Murphy says. “And that’s all part of his appeal.”
Over the course of his 40-plus-year career, the actor has never had a role better suited to him. Since saving Saturday Night Live as a teenager, he’s had to adapt to a world that wasn’t initially ready (or willing) to embrace a Black man who was that smart, funny, and confident. Axel Foley gave Murphy a chance to do what he does best: turn the tables on the silly people underestimating him.
In 1984, the first Beverly Hills Cop was the highest-grossing film in the world. It made its lead one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. But he made the movie. The Axel Foley you know and love wouldn’t have existed without Eddie Murphy.
“It wasn’t on the page,” says Beverly Hills Cop producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “He just stands up there and just does it. The hardest part, when you do these things, is to keep the crew from laughing and ruining the take, because everybody starts laughing, and you forget you’re on a movie set.”
Part 1: “You Want Me for This?”
It’s unfathomable now, but Axel Foley was almost played by someone else. At one point, Mickey Rourke was considered for the role. It being the early ’80s, Paramount also offered it to Rambo himself. Sylvester Stallone’s rewritten version of Daniel Petrie Jr.’s screenplay, Sly said in 2006, would’ve made Beverly Hills Cop look “like the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan on the beaches of Normandy.” Producing partners Bruckheimer and Don Simpson didn’t think it was that kind of movie. They wanted Murphy from the start, but it took awhile to sell that idea to the studio—even after Eddie’s first two movies, 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, were smash hits.
Jerry Bruckheimer (producer): We developed a movie, and we gave it to Paramount. We said, “We want Eddie Murphy to play this part.” We loved him on Saturday Night Live and loved what he’d done previously. They said no, and they gave it to Stallone. Stallone wanted to make the movie.
We told Paramount, “We made it for Eddie. This is for Eddie.”
“No. Stallone.”
Sly is a terrific guy and a really good writer. He came in and said, “I have to make it for me, for my character. It’s not written for me.” He wrote a script, it was really a good script, and gave it to us. It got really expensive. We had trains and all kinds of big action set pieces. We gave it to Paramount, and Paramount said, “This is way too much money. We can’t do it with Stallone.” We said, “Fine.” They said, “Who would you want to make it with?” We said, “Eddie Murphy.”
Eddie Murphy (Detective Axel Foley): I remember that the original Beverly Hills Cop script was not funny at all. So my initial reaction was “You want me for this?”
Bruckheimer: We flew out to New Jersey and sat in his kitchen and talked to Eddie.
Murphy: He’s like, “Yeah, we want you to be you. We want you to do what you do.”
Bruckheimer: He just stared at us when we told him. He didn’t say anything. Scared us half to death. In the end, we got a call: “Yeah, Eddie’d love to do it.”
John Ashton (Sergeant John Taggart): Eddie was, what, 22 at the time? I mean, Eddie’s a genius.
Judge Reinhold (Detective Billy Rosewood): He was doing stand-up at 15 years old. He’s a prodigy.
Bruckheimer: It’s instinctual. It’s just who he is. It’s just something so special about this guy that makes him the superstar that he is.
Mark Molloy (director, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F): He’s Axel, and he’s just so cool and just does it so well. But also, what he does is the mixture of comedy and drama. He had such a keen sense, when he’d come to set, every scene, of where he wanted to push it. Push the humor or where he wanted to just pull back and let the drama play out. When you’ve got an actor like that, who can do both, that’s what makes Eddie so special.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Detective Bobby Abbott, Axel F): I mean, Eddie Murphy is special, obviously. I also think there’s something that just feels right about making fun of Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills deserves it. Beverly Hills is a neighborhood that’s all around sort of flaunting excessive wealth. That’s fucked up. There’s a lot of people in the world that don’t have enough to eat. We shouldn’t be celebrating excessive wealth. And so you take a character like Axel Foley, from Detroit, and bring him into Beverly Hills to kind of take the piss out of this culture, and it feels like justice somehow. Like comedy justice.
Murphy: We mixed [comedy and drama], and it turned out great. But we didn’t know. We didn’t know it was great until after the movie came out.
Ashton: Eddie came in and it became a comedy, but the seriousness and the heaviness was still in the story line.
Murphy: Before Beverly Hills Cop, the cop movies were hard-ass, with Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, and there was no jokes. The big joke was [Murphy breaks into a perfect Eastwood impression]: “You feel lucky, punk? Go ahead and make my day.” That’s as funny as Clint Eastwood got. When you take me and put me in—even if you’ve given me the script to Dirty Harry—it would become a comedy.
Part 2: “He’s the Everyman, He’s Not a Superhero.”
It sounds hyperbolic, but Beverly Hills Cop was built on Murphy elevating every single scene he’s in as Axel. His improv skills are legendary—and helped lead to some of the franchise’s funniest moments.
Bruckheimer: I think anytime you turn him loose, he’s gold. You never know what you’re going to get. He walks on the set one day, and he’ll just rattle off something that just blows your mind.
Martin Brest (director, Beverly Hills Cop, in 1984): It’s spooky, but every time we got into a jam, I’d turn to Eddie and say, “Can you come up with something?” And every time, he came up with something that knocked me to the floor. He’s a director’s dream. He magnifies every bit of work you do by a thousandfold.
Ashton: We worked off of one another really well. And I came from the theater. So I was used to doing improvs and stuff. So Eddie throws stuff at you. You’ve got to be ready for it. The first scene we shot in was the strip joint. That’s the first time we met and the first time we worked, and it was just like magic right off the bat. We just hit it off. It was a lot of fun. It was like we already knew each other, but we didn’t.
Reinhold: It was an awkward way to start, at the strip club in this tiny little table. We’re sitting around with some naked women, and I guess it’s a great way to start a bromance. But what was interesting was the chemistry just was there. Marty cast us really well, and something took off. There was never a moment where it was “Ooh, this isn’t going to work.” There was never even a “How is this going to work?” It just worked.
Murphy: John and Judge and Bronson [Pinchot], we had an instant chemistry that just fell right in. And Paul Reiser as well.
Ashton: We developed our relationships not only as coworkers, but as real friends. I know Eddie’s going to come up with something. He knows I’m going to come up with something, and you’ve got to stay on your toes.
Reinhold: I was flattered when Marty Brest, the original director, said, “I know that when I cut to you that you’re going to be listening in a funny way.” And I wasn’t trying to do that. I wasn’t! I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You just do. I can cut to you. And it’s funny.” And so I guess that’s part of our chemistry, but it’s not like I’m trying to listen funny.
Murphy: These characters, we all work well together.
Ashton: I remember the “supercops” thing in the first one.
Well, Eddie made all that up. It was just all made up. He said, “Wait a minute.” He walked away for a while and he came back and he says, “OK, I’m ready.” And then it was a three-shot with me and Judge and Eddie, and Eddie’s going, “These guys are supercops. You ought to give ’em capes.” I was trying not to laugh. And Judge was trying not to laugh and we didn’t want to blow the take. I had to get my act together to do it straight. It was pretty tough.
Reinhold: His thing was to look down and hold the bridge of his nose where he looks like he had a headache. I put my hands in my pocket and squeezed my thigh so hard that the pain would overwhelm my compulsion to laugh. Marty was so good at putting a camera just where it needed to be. And so we couldn’t blow that take. And that was the first time we’d heard [Axel’s supercops speech]. Oh my God. So there were a few times where I went home with a big bruise on my thigh.
Murphy: The very first Beverly Hills Cop, the scene where I’m trying to get into the banquet room to talk to [bad guy] Victor Maitland. That whole scene is improvised.
Brest: I had six drafts and I wasn’t happy with any one of them. I showed them to him, he closed his eyes and six seconds later he said, “I’ve got it.” He then went through the entire spiel in character.
Murphy: I was tired, and the director was like, “You’ve got to get this scene.” I was like, “Oh no.” It was like, “I want to get out of here.” So we just went in and did the scene in different ways. I’m sure we did three or four different takes. That was the one that they kept.
Bruckheimer: The whole thing when he tried to get in the hotel, when he said he was a writer from Rolling Stone? That’s all him.
Molloy: There’s people like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He’s just really funny, in a very different way to Eddie. But you’d see the two of them look at each other. You’d catch it, and I’d know. I’d be like, “OK. This is going to be great.” Because you could feel them sort of egg each other on a little bit. But Eddie’s really generous too, because especially in some other scenes, where there was some other cast, not the lead cast. The way Eddie would see something in them and then pull them into the scene, through improv, was incredible.
Gordon-Levitt: Improvising with Eddie, the thing is, I would never reach for the jokes. And what’s maybe a little unexpected about how Eddie goes about it all is he’s really not focused on the laughs. The laughs kind of come natural.
Kevin Bacon (Captain Cade Grant, Axel F): There’s not a lot of preciousness or drama around what he’s doing. He’s also known as a hilarious comedic actor, but he doesn’t really push to try to be funny. You don’t really see him ever trying to make anybody laugh, and yet it ends up being so funny.
Murphy: When I’m improvising, I’m not improvising so much to make it funnier than it is. I’m trying to make the situation more realistic.
Reinhold: I think that’s really true, that he’s not looking to make it funnier. He’s just in the moment, and he’s making the moment more real. I would say it’s audacity, the ability just to take risks like that. I think he’s a genius. I freaking hate him.
Gordon-Levitt: The premiere [of Axel F] was [on June 20], so we got to watch it with a whole cinema full of people. Hundreds of people. And one of the biggest laughs was when I come into the room and he’s talking with his daughter and I kind of do a little double-take and realize, “Oh, these two know each other.” He goes, “Have you two had intercourse?” That was not in the script.
Molloy: There’s a lot of scenes where it’s him and Taylour [Paige], [who plays Axel’s] daughter, in the car. Every take, he would just turn it differently. I think he was just loving watching her slowly crack up every time, or seeing how long she could go while trying to hold it together.
Gordon-Levitt: If you watch an Eddie Murphy performance, as bombastic as his comedy can sometimes be, even when he’s behind huge prosthetic makeup in The Nutty Professor or Coming to America, his characters always feel like real people.
Murphy: That’s who Axel is. He’s the everyman, he’s not a superhero.
Part 3: “You Just Fucking Love Him.”
Since Beverly Hills Cop III came out in 1994, there have been rumors of a fourth film being in development. But for a while, it felt like Murphy had hung up his Lions jacket—which he actually first wore in Tony Scott’s Beverly Hills Cop II—for good. Then Netflix came calling. In 2022, Australian filmmaker Mark Molloy was announced as the director of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. Molloy’s first major studio film is full of practical action, quippy comedy, and needle drops—like Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On”—borrowed from the original. There’s even an update of Harold Faltermeyer’s instrumental “Axel F,” a top five hit in 1985.
Molloy, who until recently mostly made commercials, remembers pitching Murphy on the sequel. Like Bruckheimer and Simpson more than 40 years ago, Molloy met the comedy star on his turf.
Molloy: It was at Eddie’s house, actually. Me, Jerry, and Eddie together. Probably a little bit nicer than [Eddie’s] kitchen back in Jersey.
Bruckheimer: He had a nice place then, too.
Molloy: Did he? It was quite daunting for me too, because I really wanted to pitch him on the film. Then he said to me, when we were there, “This is the most important character I’ve ever played.” I was like, “OK, so no pressure.” I just really wanted to tell him my vision for the film, and he agreed. And here we are.
Gordon-Levitt: My big brother was a huge Eddie Murphy fan, and I was quite young. I was really too young to be watching these movies. The stuff that he liked was always this magically, mystically super cool stuff, and Eddie Murphy was that to me back then. So now to be playing the new sidekick in this new Beverly Hills Cop movie? It’s an incredible thing.
Bruckheimer: You’ve got to give them what they loved about the previous ones, but also give them something new.
Molloy: I think it’s about grabbing those elements that make it feel like a Beverly Hills Cop film, too.
Gordon-Levitt: In a lot of big action movies nowadays, when you see something spectacular, it’s fake. That didn’t really happen. It’s basically a cartoon. It’s just very sophisticated CGI. Animation. Not so in Beverly Hills Cop. There’s a helicopter scene in this movie where the helicopter’s falling off a building and then hits the road with sparks and then barely misses a bus. There was a crazy stunt helicopter pilot that did all of that shit. For real.
Bacon: You feel that. And that’s the nostalgia piece of it.
Ashton: When [Judge, Eddie, and I] got in the car together, it was like yesterday. We shot it almost in the exact location we shot the first one. Oh my God. It was a very déjà vu feeling. And one of the crew guys came over to me and he said, “I was eight years old when I saw the first one. And seeing you guys back in the car gives me goosebumps.”
Reinhold: We had walked out of a movie that they’d seen that they grew up with, and that’s why it was enchanting for them. I don’t think, honestly, that’s too big a word. It was an enchanting evening. And they knew we were doing something special. And then the three of us did the scene. But the first thing that Eddie did was he got in the back of the car and looked at us and said, “Well, at least we still resemble our characters.”
Murphy: It went right back to the rapport that we had.
Bacon: What’s interesting about that character is that Eddie was already doing great. He was already well on his way to megastardom, but this was the one that he did by himself. And the bigger question is: Why do you make four of these? And the reason you make four of these is because you want to see Axel again. You want to see Eddie as Axel.
Reinhold: Axel, what he does is he distracts people. It’s cognitive dissonance. He throws them off so he can get through to what he wants. Yeah, Eddie is being funny doing it, but that’s his drive. That’s his goal, to just confuse people. And it’s magic. And it was my favorite thing in this movie to watch him do that again.
Murphy: He’s a fish out of water, and he has to rise to the occasion.
Gordon-Levitt: We wanted to make a good new Beverly Hills Cop movie. And when we wrapped, Eddie gave me a big hug and he looked me in the eye and he goes, “We did a good one.” And with a lot of certainty.
Reinhold: We didn’t have to work at it. And there we were, 40 years later, and it was just there. It was just there. Whatever that was between us. It was just there, just like it was at the strip club 40 years ago. It’s very special.
Bacon: Now, 40 years later, he comes on. You see the sneakers, you see the jacket, you see his attitude. All he’s got to do is be driving down the street in Detroit, and you just fucking love him.
Murphy: I think it’s endured so long because it’s funny! And I think the character, like I said, is the everyman. In the world of superheroes and superpeople flying around on-screen, this is a guy who’s just a guy. He’s just a guy.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
