00:00It all starts with Beverly Hills Cop.
00:03It altered the perception.
00:05You know, hey, you can have a movie with a brother
00:08that the whole world would go see?
00:09It's like, yeah, that starts with that movie.
00:12And I'm aware of it. I be keeping score.
00:15Hell, you say, okay, all right.
00:18Okay, I started that right there.
00:21Oh, yeah, they doing that.
00:23Oh, yeah, it's nice. I started that too.
00:26Y'all safe? Everybody safe?
00:28There's no seatbelt in the middle.
00:30What the hell with the seatbelt? We on the edge.
00:38So for my first question, man,
00:40the previous Beverly Hills Cop film was released 30 years ago in May of 94.
00:45With you returning to your role of Axel Foley,
00:48was that something that you knew you wanted to do after the last film,
00:52or did it kind of manifest in recent years?
00:54It's actually, it has just been in the background simmering for years and years.
00:59We were trying to develop Beverly Hills Cop since the last one ended.
01:04Since 1994, we was trying, but nothing ever came together.
01:08We had different scripts and different producers that came in,
01:11and somebody would be working on it, and it just never, ever, was never, ever right.
01:16Because after the third one, I was like, hey, this third one is not on the level of the first two.
01:23I was like, this third one is kind of soft.
01:25So I was like, I'm not doing another one unless it's, you know, this shit is right.
01:29And it just wasn't right. Nothing was right.
01:32And that took 30 years to get it right.
01:34So the first film, it ushered in the action comedy genre.
01:39It started it. It started it. It started it. It started it.
01:42It started it. Yeah.
01:43It started the action comedy genre, and it's also the first movie in the history of movies that start a black man that was successful all around the world.
01:59All around the world. It's the first movie like that in history.
02:03So can you talk to me about your feelings about that and how that's like such a formula for success now in the film industry?
02:11Can you talk to me about how you feel about the impact that the film and the franchise itself has had on the film industry?
02:17I love it. I love it. And I'm aware of the impact, and I love it.
02:22You know, even if a lot of people, most people don't know that Beverly Hills Cop is where that started.
02:28And most people don't know that, you know, most black, most movies with black folks, they only see them in the States.
02:33You know, they just assume, oh, yeah, movies come out everywhere.
02:37But usually we do, our movies are just in the States usually.
02:41And Beverly Hills Cop is the first one, like I said, it's all around the world.
02:45And that opens up, you know, that the world to Will Smith and to The Rock, these other people that are all around the world.
02:53It all starts with Beverly Hills Cop. It altered the perception.
02:58You know, hey, you can have a movie with a brother that the whole world would go see?
03:03It's like, yeah, that starts with that movie.
03:05And I'm aware of it. I be keeping score.
03:08You say, okay, all right. Okay, I started that shit right there.
03:14Oh, yeah, they doing that. Oh, yeah, it's nice. I started that shit too.
03:19Yeah.
03:23So kind of adding on that, you've been in a lot of films over your career.
03:27I believe there's over 40 feature films in your career, which is phenomenal.
03:31So you're an expert at the craft at this point.
03:34I wanted to ask, like when you reprise a role, specifically this role that you're into now with Axel Foley,
03:41did you treat each film like a new endeavor?
03:44Or did you kind of take something from the previous film and then kind of add to it?
03:48Like, how did you prepare for Axel Foley in this new film?
03:51What we did preparing for this movie was we said, hey, the last movie didn't have all the elements that are supposed to be in a Beverly Hills Cop movie.
04:02So if we do another one, we have to have all the elements that are in a Beverly Hills Cop movie for the movie to work.
04:10And this movie checked all those boxes.
04:14I said I read all these scripts that didn't have all the elements.
04:17The first Beverly Hills Cop, Axel goes to Beverly Hills because somebody close to him gets killed.
04:24That's why he's there.
04:25And the second one, he goes there because his boss gets killed.
04:28That's why he's there.
04:29And the third Beverly Hills Cop, he's there because Uncle Dave is in trouble, like this Disney character.
04:35It's like Uncle Dave is in trouble and they're doing counterfeiting.
04:38So you don't bite your teeth into it like that.
04:41Axel doesn't have any skin in the game.
04:43And this, when we added Axel's got a daughter, he's estranged from his daughter, and she's in trouble.
04:50And that's why he's in Beverly Hills.
04:52Once we added that element to it, that's when we knew we had a movie.
04:56So we looked at all the stuff that was missing in the last one and we was like,
05:00we've got to make sure we have all the right ingredients.
05:02And we've got to have all the cast, you know, all the cast is important.
05:07We didn't have a second movie, a third movie, Taggart, John Ashton's not in the movie.
05:11You've got to have Taggart and Rosewood and Serge.
05:15You've got to have all the play and Paul Reis' character.
05:18You've got to have all of that stuff to make it, you know,
05:21have all the ingredients that was in the first one.
05:24Well, thank you so much, Eddie.
05:25I really appreciate your time and thank you again.
05:28Yeah, man.
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