10 Actors Who Keep Getting Miscast

Eddie Murphy was on fire all throughout the 80s and 90s as an actor and a comedian. But for the last two decades he’s had a run of mostly forgettable family films like Meet Dave and Norbitt. This turn in his career came at the end of the 90s when took on the role of The Nutty Professor, which then spawned a sequel and several films which followed the formula of Murphy playing multiple roles under heavy prosthetics and makeup. Hollywood was spitting out Eddie Murphy family movies at the rate of about one per year until about 8 years ago.

Perhaps it was career fatigue, but Murphy decided to call it quits on family films, although it has proven to be a tough rut to get himself out of. Murphy has been slowly returning to the fold of more mature work, first in 2006’s musical-drama Dreamgirls, then again in 2011’s crime-comedy Tower Heist. Then there was the 2016 drama Mr. Church which failed at the box office. For years he and Lee Daniels have been trying to get a biopic of Richard Pryor off the ground, in which Murphy would play Pryor’s father.

2019 was the year when hope for an Eddie Murphy comeback started to finally seem possible. Dolemite Is My Name, in which he played the title role of the real life hard-on-his luck comedian Rudy Ray More who became a blaxspoitation star, proved to be just the right material to herald Murphy's comeback. Next up will be a sequel to the raunchy 1988 film Coming to America, a fourth Beverly Hills Cop is in the works, and there are rumors that Murphy is planning a new standup comedy special.