“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” director Mark Molloy discusses Eddie Murphy and how he brought the sequel back to its roots 40 years after the release of the original film.
Director Mark Molloy said once Eddie Murphy turned up on the set of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the esteemed actor instantly became the Axel Foley audiences know and love from the 1984 action comedy classic.
Murphy looked so much like hadn’t aged, in fact, that Molloy forgot that he was directing a 63-year-old star, not the 23-year-old from the original film.
“Because he looked so good, I just pretended that he hadn’t aged. I just said, ‘Okay, Eddie, run down that flight of stairs!’ I was asking him to be physical because he looked so great,” Molloy recalled for me, laughing, in a recent Zoom conversation. “Then Eddie looked at me and said, ‘Hey, man, are you trying to kill me here? What’s going on?’ I really put him through his paces on the movie. I really tested Eddie on this one.”
New on Netflix Wednesday, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is remarkable in that the movie not only marks Murphy’s return to his iconic role of Axel Foley that he established four decades ago—it’s Molloy’s debut as a feature film director.
Thankful for legendary Beverly Hills Cop producer Jerry Bruckheimer trusting him with the keys to the franchise, the Australian filmmaker said he tried not to dwell on the fact that not only was Axel F his first movie, but the first Beverly Hills Cop movie in 30 years after the third film in the franchise was released in 1994.
“I tried to get over that and get to work because you can let the expectations and scale of what you’re doing get the better of you,” Molloy said. “The good thing is that I had a very clear vision for the film from the time I read the script which [screenwriter] Will [Beall] had done a good job of writing. The story was so confident in what it needed to be for a Beverly Hills Cop film. When I read the script I said, ‘This could be great, but I want to do it in a certain way.’
Once Molloy pitched his idea for Axel F to Bruckheimer, Murphy and Netflix and they became confident in his vision, the process of shooting the first Beverly Hills Cop film in three decades became much less daunting.
Perhaps the biggest thing Molloy remembers stressing in his first meeting with Bruckheimer was his intention of creating the exact same tone as the first two Beverly Hills Cop films from 1984 and 1987.
