Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 14, 2025
Netflix’s Eddie Murphy documentary Being Eddie is out this week. It’s OK. A parade of talking heads — Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, Pete Davidson, Tracee Ellis Ross, and more — reflect on Murphy’s career, while Murphy himself stays fairly soft-spoken as he looks back on his many successes (and a few missteps). It’s not especially insightful, but if you’re an Eddie Murphy fan, it’s worth a watch, if only to see the inside of his home, hear him talk about his cats, and meet his wife, Australian model Paige Butcher.
Obviously, SNL plays a major role in his life and therefore in the documentary. The film essentially bookends his story with his rise on the sketch series and his eventual return as host after a 35-year absence.
He also revisits — not for the first time — why he stayed away so long: David Spade’s 1995 joke on Spade’s “Hollywood Minute” segment on “Update.” With a photo of Murphy onscreen, Spade quipped, “Look, kids. It’s a falling star. Make a wish.”
The joke drew boos and groans (Spade: “When you make a Hollywood Minute omelet, you break some eggs”), but no one was more upset than Murphy.
“I was hurt. My feelings were hurt,” he says. “I’m from the same… it’s like your alma mater taking a shot at you. At my career. Not how funny I was. They called me a falling star. If there was a joke like that right now, about some other SNL cast member and how f***ed up their career was, it would be shot down.”
He’s not wrong. Imagine taking a swing like that at Kate McKinnon now. Or Will Ferrell.
“And the joke has to go through all those channels a joke has to go through,” Murphy continues, “and then it was on the air… so I wasn’t like f*** David Spade. I was like f*** SNL. How y’all gonna do that to me? That’s what you think of me? You dirty motherf… and that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”
I get it, and I don’t blame him, though to be fair to SNL, Murphy was so big at the time that he dwarfed the show. He wasn’t former SNL cast member Eddie Murphy — he was the biggest comedian on the planet, Eddie Murphy.
It was still a cheap shot.
Eventually, he did return. During his long hiatus from acting after 2011, he decided he wanted to remind everyone that he’d stepped back from movies by choice, and he chose to return to SNL. “You know what,” he said. “F*** this. SNL is part of my history. That’s where I come from… I don’t have no smoke with David Spade, no heat with anybody.”
The documentary then gives us about ten minutes of SNL people showering Murphy with praise, cut together with behind-the-scenes footage from that episode — including a moment when Lorne Michaels called Chris Rock to “come down.” “I thought Eddie Murphy had canceled and they wanted me to replace him,” Rock jokes. But it all worked out, giving SNL its highest ratings in a decade at the time.
