It’s unfortunate but celebrity and drug use sometimes go together. While drug use doesn’t always lead to tragic consequences, it certainly has happened. One actor who has avoided getting into hard drugs is Eddie Murphy, though he admits it’s not from lack of opportunity. He says he was once offered cocaine while hanging out with Robin Williams and John Belushi.
Appearing on the New York Times Interview podcast (via Page Six) the Beverly Hills Cop actor revealed that just as he started working as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, he found himself hanging out with former SNL star John Belushi and Robin Williams, and the two offered him a chance to try cocaine, which he declined. Murphy said…
I remember I was 19, I went to the Blues Bar. It was me, Belushi, and Robin Williams. They start doing coke, and I was like, ‘No, I’m cool.’
Murphy has apparently led an almost entirely clean lifestyle throughout his professional career. The actor says he doesn’t even drink and didn’t try pot until the age of 30. He called being famous at such a young age a “minefield” and he seemed quite aware of the potential for things to go bad. Luckily for him, he says doing drugs just never really interested him. Murphy continued…
I wasn’t taking some moral stance. I just wasn’t interested in it. To not have the desire or the curiosity, I’d say that’s providence. God was looking over me in that moment.
Murphy credits God as a force that helped him not want to do these things. He says it wasn’t a moral problem, he didn’t necessarily have an issue with drugs or the people who chose to do them. Rather, he seemed to understand the potential problems they could cause for him, and as such, simply had little interest in them.
John Belushi tragically passed away in 1982 following a heroin overdose. Robin Williams eventually got sober, he would later say he did so specifically because of Belushi’s death. The actor would talk openly during his stand-up performances about the toll that drugs took on him. Williams even discussed his addiction problems with young co-stars in his movies.
Considering that one of the men who was with Eddie Murphy that night would die of a drug overdose only a couple of years later, it’s not surprising that the actor feels like someone or something was looking out for him. He certainly knows what the worst-case scenario in that situation would have been.
We’ve seen too many great stars die young thanks to drugs. While other stars from Rob Lowe to Tom Holland now living a sober lifestyle. Eddie Murphy has had a strong career for four decades. He has even been able to return to one of his earliest movie hits with a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie, Axel: F which recently arrived for everybody with a Netflix subscription. While Murphy may have been able to try cocaine that night and still become the star he is today, for him that was never a concern, and that’s not a bad thing.