Eddie Murphy is looking back on a wild proposition he received during his early days of fame.
In the new Netflix documentary Being Eddie, the comedian reveals that when he was 21, The King and I star Yul Brynner tried to invite him home for what Murphy is pretty sure was meant to be a sexual encounter with the late actor’s wife.
“Nobody had as much fun as we had in the ’80s. Nobody,” Murphy prefaced his story. “My 21st birthday party, I had at Studio 54. Yul Brynner, from The Ten Commandments, he was with his wife, and he was like, ‘How would you like to go back to my apartment with my wife and I and party?'”
The Coming to America star said he politely declined, answering, “Nah, I’m cool.”
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Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’
It wasn’t until years later that he had a better understanding of the full request.
“I got older, I was like, party?” Murphy remembered thinking. “His wife was smiling. I was like, ‘Did he want me to go f— his wife?’ I was like, what the? When I got older, I thought back on it.”
In hindsight, Murphy said he would have had a different response for the actor, who died in 1985 at age 65.
“Now I wish I would’ve went. The story would end better if, you know, ‘Yeah, I went back to Yul Brynner’s spot and f—ed his wife. He was watching me f—ing… He was going, ‘Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,'” he laughed, mimicking the Best Actor-winner’s famous line.
Courtesy of Netflix
Eddie Murphy in ‘Being Eddie’
The story is just one of many memorable encounters for Murphy, who joined the cast of Saturday Night Live straight out of high school. He confirmed that his younger years looked a lot like the stories his late brother, Charlie Murphy, told about them on Chappelle’s Show.
“Every night was like that,” the Dreamgirls actor said in the doc, insisting he never actually wanted to partake in that aspect of Hollywood life himself.
“When I hung out with, like, Rick James and them in the ’80s, when I would start seeing certain people come in the room, and you know what’s getting ready to start going down. They get ready to be in the other room getting down, I just bounced,” he said. “I was never curious about it. I never wanted to go in there, check it out, or nothing. I just wasn’t with it.”
Murphy explained he was never interested in substances, even when offered up by legends.
“When I was 19, it was my first year of Saturday Night Live, I went to a blues bar with John Belushi and Robin Williams. They put some blow on the table. I’m standing there with, you know, two heroes,” he recalled. “I wasn’t even curious. I was just not with it.”
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Eddie Murphy during ‘Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood’ sketch on ‘SNL’ on Feb. 6, 1982 –
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The Oscar nominee shared that not only has he “never even tried cocaine,” he also doesn’t drink or smoke cigarettes and “never smoked a joint until I was 30 years old.”
Being Eddie is on Netflix now.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly