Billboard Women in Music 2025

Eddie Murphy is detailing the unexpected career advice he received from Sidney Poitier . Murphy recently said during an interview for the Apple TV+ documentary “Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood” (via Entertainment Weekly ) that Poitier told him not to star in “ Malcolm X ” as author Alex Haley. The film , which at the time was to be directed by Norman Jewison (who directed Poitier in “In the Heat of the Night”), was directed instead by Spike Lee.

“They were talking about doing ‘Malcolm X,’” Murphy said. “Norman Jewison was putting it together. They were going to use ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ by Alex Haley, and they approached me about playing Alex Haley. Around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something, and I asked him, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking about playing Alex Haley!’ And Sidney Poitier said, ‘You are not Denzel [Washington], and you are not Morgan [Freeman]. You are a breath of fresh air, and don’t fuck with that!’”

While Washington was later cast (and Oscar nominated for) the role of the titular civil rights icon in Lee’s “Malcolm X,” Murphy added that he wasn’t quite sure what Poitier meant by the comment. “I didn’t know if it was an insult or a compliment,” Murphy said. “I was like, ‘What?’”

Murphy added that, as a Black male actor, he was in “uncharted waters” in terms of his career. “For Sidney and all those guys, when I showed up, it was something kind of new,” Murphy said. “They didn’t have a reference for me, they couldn’t give me advice, because I was 20, 21 years old, and my audience was the mainstream — all of everywhere. My movies [were] all around the world, and they had never had that with a young Black person. So nobody could give me advice, really. Everything broke really big and really fast.”

“Malcolm X” director Lee previously told IndieWire that the budget was a major “obstacle” for making his version of the biopic. “I’d been paid $2 million [by Warner Bros.] and put in half my salary to make the film. So we were stuck,” Lee said in 2024 of the studio then shutting down production before he found the financing on his own.

Lee instead opted to put in his own funds to expand the budget for the film, plus ask “Black folks with some money” that he knew. Those people included Bill Cosby, Tracy Chapman, Janet Jackson, Prince, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, and Lee said, “I promised each person, saying that I would go to my grave without saying how much each gift was.”