Eddie Murphy is covering everything on his Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F press tour

At the beginning of a lengthy interview with The New York Times, Eddie Murphy spoke about the ways he took his fame for granted when he was just starting out. “I started at maybe around 13, 14, saying that I was going to be famous. I’d tell my mother, ‘When I’m famous…’ So when I got famous, it was like, ‘See, I told you,’” he recalled.

Clearly, some of that cavalier attitude remains, despite Murphy’s massive success since. In the interview, ostensibly meant to promote Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Murphy barely talked about the matter at hand at all. Instead, conversation topics ranged across everything from his frustration with The Golden Bachelor, to his relationship with Marlon Brando, to the Saturday Night Live joke that kept him away from Studio 8H for 30 years. Here are some highlights from the very fun conversation:

• Murphy went on two meal dates with Marlon Brando, who apparently hates Clint Eastwood: After Murphy’s 1982 film 48 Hrs., the actor said Brando called his agent to set up a dinner, which led to a lunch (that Murphy was late for) shortly after. During those meetings, the legendary performer called acting “bullshit,” referred to The Godfather as “eh,” and insulted Clint Eastwood. According to Murphy: “He was going, ‘I can’t stand that kid with the gun.’ I was like, ‘What kid with the gun?’ He said, ‘He’s on the poster!’ I was like, ‘Clint Eastwood?’ ‘Yeah, that guy!’ He was calling Clint Eastwood ‘that kid.’”
• He can’t name a Taylor Swift song: He also doesn’t keep up with any 20-something actors. (Sorry, Timothée and co.)
• Instead, he watches “not hip stuff”: The stuff in question? Family Feud, The Masked Singer, and The Golden Bachelor. He’s pissed about that last one, by the way. “You know they broke up?” he asked. “What kind of [expletive] is that? I watched that, I was like, ‘This is so nice, they found love in the second part of their life.’ Then I find out these [expletive] broke up three months later!”
• He also watches YouTube, but doesn’t “just go random on it”: His current rabbit hole is videos of a one-legged tap dancer from the ‘40s called Peg Leg Bates. “He lost his leg and he was undeterred, went out there, and he became a legend,” Murphy said.
• He’s pretty straight edge: Murphy shared that he’s protected himself as someone who got famous young, “especially [as] a Black artist,” by avoiding alcohol and hard drugs. At 19, he apparently said no to doing coke at the Blues Bar with John Belushi and Robin Williams, not due to “some moral stance,” but because he simply wasn’t interested. He also smoked his first joint at age 30 and had a good laugh about some gourmet jelly beans.
• He thinks The Nutty Professor is his best performance: “I like Bowfinger, but I could think of 20 other actors that could have played that role,” he said. “I can’t think of another person that could do Nutty Professor.”
• He thought David Spade’s SNL joke at his expense was racist: After his 1995 film Vampire In Brooklyn “flopped,” Murphy’s fellow SNL star, David Spade, made a joke about him being a “falling star” that Murphy didn’t appreciate. “It was like: ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re [expletive] with me like that?’ It hurt my feelings like that, yeah,” Murphy said. “‘A joke about my career?’ So I thought that was a cheap shot. And it was kind of, I thought—I felt it was racist.” While he stayed away from the show for three decades after that, he said he’s cool with Spade and Lorne Michaels now.
• He’s “never had joy”: “The process of making a movie, it’s work,” he explained. While he loves being in scenes, he doesn’t love the “hurry up and wait” of it all. He also doesn’t “gravitate toward things that I think would be challenging” and instead “want[s] to do something I know works and something that I know I can be funny doing.”
• His dream project is a mockumentary called Soul, Soul, Soul: Murphy has apparently been “threatening” to make Soul, Soul, Soul, a “Zelig kind of thing, where it’s this guy who’s part of the rock ’n’ roll, R&B thing back in the ’60s and worked with everybody,” for years. He even created a trailer that both Donald Glover and the NYT interviewer David Marchese have seen and insist needs to get made. “[I]t’s so much work. That’s been the deterrent,” Murphy said. “But I tell you, one day I’ll do it.”

Beverly Hill Cop: Axel F premieres July 3 in theaters.