If there’s one thing Eddie Murphy loves, it’s burying himself under prosthetics to play numerous characters. He’s done it in Coming to America, Vampire in Brooklyn, Bowfinger, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Meet Dave, but perhaps his most famous and popular example of wearing multiple hats came in The Nutty Professor and its successor The Klumps.
The actor played at least seven roles in both movies, with Buddy Love the only one that didn’t require him to get into the makeup chair. The comedian portrayed Sherman, Cletus, Mama, Granny and Ernie Klump, as well as fitness instructor Lance Perkins, while in the sequel he did it all over again, adding a young version of Cletus Klump into the mix for good measure. The two installments combined to earn over $440 million at the box office, making the duology a pair of Murphy’s biggest commercial hits ever.
The 59 year-old will next be seen on our screens this Friday in long-awaited sequel Coming 2 America, in which he reprises all four of the characters he played in the 1988 original. And in a new interview, the Shrek star revealed that the Klumps almost appeared in Coming 2 America for a cameo, and that they would have shown up in a circumcision scene, which invites an altogether different set of questions.
“There was a scene in this Coming 2 America we just did. There was a scene where the Klumps, remember the circumcision scene? Originally, the Klumps kind of popped up in that scene. In the long run, it was too hard a left, and it would have been too expensive to do. So yeah, they were in this thing.”
It’s a fun idea in practice, one that would have appealed to Murphy’s fans, but getting suited and booted as an additional six or seven characters in a movie where he’s already playing four would have been time consuming to say the least, especially for what would have amounted to a throwaway gag. Besides, Coming 2 America should be able to draw in a big enough audience when it debuts on Prime Video without the actor having to go full meta.
