Eddie Murphy Reveals Why He Stepped Away From Acting for Eight Years

Eddie Murphy is looking back at his career.

The 59-year-old actor opened up about taking a step back from acting on an episode of The Drew Barrymore Show on Friday (March 12).

Drew asked, “You had such a succession of these epic films, you know you were so young do you ever come down from those periods of time where you had hit after hit and you’re working?”

“I’ll tell you what happened to me,” Eddie replied. “I had it all the way together for years and years and years and then what happened with movies is they started offering you so much money to do stuff that I wound up doing, you know what that’s like, you’re just there and ‘You want to give me that much money to do that sh-t? Okay.’”

“I wound up doing a bunch of movies like that and it’s forever, like way after the money is spent that sh-itty movie is still playing on the movie channel,” he continued. “So I got to where I stopped having fun making movies, so I had to take a time, like 2011 I think it was, I stopped for like eight years, I stopped making movies and that’s when I had really, really quiet time and got re-centered. If I’m going to be doing something I want to be doing it because I want to do it. I got it all back together that way.”

Eddie also performed Drew‘s favorite Coming to America line, which you can watch in the clip below!

Drew recently discussed whether she had any plans to return to acting as well.