When Ryan Reynolds isn’t busy dreaming up new sarcastic superheroes or raking in just a little bit of money, he’s talking about a genre near and dear to his heart: comedy. And he has some thoughts about what film Eddie Murphy needed to take home an Oscar for.
Fans might think Reynolds wanted Murphy to take home the 1997 Best Actor Oscar for playing James/Thunder Early in Dreamgirls… but that isn’t the case!
In an interview for the podcast Variety Circuit Awards, Reynolds revealed the movie he is thinking of. Reynolds said, “We sort of unnecessarily hurdle ourselves over comedy as a craft, and if you ask me, one of the greatest injustices is that Eddie Murphy doesn’t have an Oscar for The Nutty Professor or The Klumps.”
Although Murphy won a 2007 Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role Golden Globe for Dreamgirls, Alan Arkin won the 2007 Oscar in that category for portraying the hilarious and bitter Grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine.
As anyone who has seen The Nutty Professor knows, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill comedy where a big star sleepwalks through the whole story and takes home a huge paycheck at the end. Murphy put in some serious work. The successful actor/investor/husband of the controversial Blake Lively praised Murphy for playing “10 different characters at one table.” Murphy not only plays the main character Cletus Klump but also his parents Anna Pearl and Cletus, his grandma Ida Mae Jensen, his brother Ernie Klump Sr., Lance Perkins (who is meant to be a take on Richard Simmons), and Buddy Love.
Even Murphy knows he was incredible in The Nutty Professor. In a 2024 interview with The New York Times, he mentioned makeup artist Rick Baker’s impressive work and said, “there’s no sign of me: I could walk in a room, and a person wouldn’t even know it was me.” Back in 2011, he told Rolling Stone that after some flops, he thought, “Let me show you what I can f*cking do. I’ll do something where I play all these different characters.”
Reynolds isn’t the only one impressed with The Nutty Professor, and even the sequel was a favorite at the box office. The Free Guy and The Proposal star is definitely onto something: more unique and creative comedies need to be recognized at the Academy Awards. After all, there isn’t even a comedy category! Doesn’t that seem wild? In 2011, Judd Apatow said there should be, and it’s amazing to think that so many years have passed without that coming to fruition.
Speaking of 2011, let’s take a look at the kinds of movies that were up for Best Picture. The King’s Speech won over The Social Network. No shade to the well-crafted Colin Firth drama, but are we still sitting here thinking about that movie… or is Aaron Sorkin’s social media story more relevant to our lives? A sophisticated and somber film (bonus points for a biopic or historical tale) will usually win over the popular and commercial. It was totally unfair that a legitimate comedy like The Kids Are Alright, which also features awesome performances from Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo, was up against darker fare like 127 Hours and Black Swan. How could those movies possibly compete with one another?
The truth is that some Oscar ceremonies are dull and seeing all the beautiful gowns on the red carpet can be more fun and exciting than sitting through the awards and monologues. Adding a comedy category would fix that issue, and then, like Reynolds said, talented actors like Murphy would get the awards they deserve.