Eddie Murphy's Coming To America Barbers Fooled A Major U.S. Politician

Rick Baker is the greatest make-up artist in the history of motion pictures. He was born to the craft, and was tutored by greats like Bob Burns and Dick Smith. After assisting the latter on the set of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist," he created the hideous mutant baby for Larry Cohen's "It's Alive." He went on to do phenomenal work on "Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope," "The Fury," and "Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back" before blowing moviegoers' minds with his werewolf transformation in John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London." Baker's work on that masterpiece earned him his first Academy Award for Best Makeup, a category that was basically created to honor his particular genius. He would go on to win six more.

No one could have predicted that Baker would find his comedic muse in Eddie Murphy, but the restless "Saturday Night Live" star (who enjoyed disappearing under makeup, as evidenced by his brilliant "White Like Me" sketch) is a hardcore genre nerd, and knew the Oscar winner could help him become other people via the skillful application of prosthetics. So when Murphy set out to make the celebration of Black culture that is "Coming to America," he enlisted Baker's assistance. Murphy had Baker transform him into a terrible local musician named Randy Watson, a mouthy old barber who unabashedly lies about having met Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frank Sinatra (who claimed Joe Louis was 137 years old), and an elderly Jewish man.

When I saw the film theatrically, I'll be honest: I knew Murphy was portraying Watson and the barber (ditto Arsenio Hall the other barber). But I was stunned to learn at the end of the movie that he played the old Jewish man. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson, who was running for President of the United States in 1988, was fooled front to back.

In the Netflix documentary "Being Eddie," the star says Jesse Jackson approached him after the premiere of "Coming to America" to commend him on his casting choices. Per Murphy:

"When we did the original 'Coming to America,' at the afterparty, Jesse Jackson came up to me and he was like, 'Hey, you know, I wanna say thank you for looking out for some of the older Black actors and putting them in the film, you know, and giving them a shot because those guys are gonna become stars,'"

Murphy was dumbfounded, but Jackson was genuine in his praise. He thought the actors in the barbershop scene were going to be breakout stars. Murphy, who'd spoofed Jackson on "SNL" in the wake of the politician's anti-Semitic "Hymietown" comment when he was running for President in 1984, shot back. "I was like, 'Motherf***er, that was me," said Murphy. "And he was like, 'What? What? That was you? Now I got to go see the movie again.'"

It's amusing that Jackson apparently didn't identify Murphy as the Jewish man, but Baker's work was so uniformly exceptional that I don't think anyone, if they're being honest, knew that it was Eddie. I think the funniest part of this story might be Murphy calling a vital Civil Rights Movement figure "motherf***er." Only Eddie Murphy could get away with that.