Known the world over for his work portraying Sherman Klump, Buckwheat, and John David Stutts, the man who killed Buckwheat, Eddie Murphy is roughly as ubiquitous as a film and television star can be.
With that fame comes curiosity. What do we know about the man who saved Saturday Night Live, befriended Shrek, mentored Mulan, and killed Buckwheat? Here, let’s take a look at some of the basics: His age, his reported net worth, and what really happened to Buckwheat.
What is Eddie Murphy’s age?
Eddie Murphy, perhaps best known as the man who killed Buckwheat, is 62 years old. It’s one of those celebrity ages that you hear and immediately feel old, like when you learn that Macaulay Culkin is deep in his 40s now, or that Santa was roughly your age in The Santa Clause.
Murphy has been at it for a while, too. He first broke into the public eye after earning a spot on SNL when he was 19 years old. By the time he was 30, he’d defined comedy superstardom for his generation, turning Coming to America, Trading Places, and 48 Hours into blockbuster hits. When tastes changed and his edgier comedies stopped doing business, he moved on to family-friendly pictures in his late 30s and early 40s, providing voice performances for iconic animated characters like Mushu and Donkey while further tearing up the box office with his Nutty Professor and Dr. Dolittle franchises.
In 2019, he even returned to SNL after a long, self-imposed exodus, marking his only appearance on the sketch series aside from a brief speech during the show’s 40th anniversary special. He was 58 when he hit the stage, breathing new life into old favorite characters like Gumby and Mister Robinson, and in a sketch lambasting the hit reality singing competition The Masked Singer, once again portraying Buckwheat, who was purportedly shot by John David Stutts.
What is Eddie Murphy’s net worth?
Reporting on a star’s net worth always comes with a significant amount of guesswork if you’re not also doing their accounting for them. That said, current estimates put Murphy’s personal holdings at around $200 million.
Murphy’s financial trajectory is bananas. According to Celebrity Net Worth, he started out on SNL making $4,500 per episode in 1981, the year that he debuted Buckwheat. By the following year, he was pulling in $30,000 per episode, meaning that he earned around half a million dollars for the 14 episodes that he appeared in during the 1983/84 season when Buckwheat was shot.
Then came the movies. 48 Hours saw Murphy making $450,000 in a starring role, but by the time Another 48 Hours rolled around eight years later, he commanded a $7 million paycheck. The hits kept coming, and he was reportedly making eight-figure sums throughout the ‘90s: $15 million for Beverly Hills Cop 3, $16 million for The Nutty Professor, $17.5 million for Dr. Dolittle.
A string of disappointments that included A Thousand Words, Meet Dave, and Norbit couldn’t keep the man down, thanks to Murphy’s constant work behind the microphone voicing Donkey in the Shrek franchise, with its myriad of sequels and spinoffs. Then, in the late 2010s and into the 2020s, Murphy found his next big payday thanks to the streaming industry’s love for nostalgia acts. In 2019, multiple sources claimed that Murphy was in talks with Netflix to produce his first new standup special in decades, with a $70 million price tag being thrown around. In 2021, he signed a three-picture deal with Amazon Studios. If it helps you to visualize this level of wealth, consider this: Eddie Murphy has purchased a private island. Twice.
And yes, $200 million sounds like a lot of money. A borderline fantastical amount of money. The sort of money that keeps a person comfortable for the rest of their life, sipping only the finest cognac and eating nothing but crab cakes or, if they’re allergic to crab, imitation crab cakes. With $200 million, you could hire the finest private detectives in the world and finally get answers as to who killed Buckwheat.
But consider this: Eddie Murphy has 10 kids. 10 of them. That’s almost enough kids to man an entire soccer team. Kids are expensive, and with $200 million, the guy is probably living hand to mouth at this point. It’s no wonder he did Candy Cane Lane.