Eddie Murphy is making a career comeback after years of lying low in Hollywood. He’s hoping to host the 2020 Oscars after he hits the ‘SNL’ stage for the first time in the 35 years since he left the show.
Eddie Murphy used to be one of the most visible — and bankable — stars in Hollywood. The 58-year-old funnyman has laid low for the better part of a decade and now he’s mounting an epic career comeback. He stars in the new biopic Dolomite Is My Name an he’s making one of the most highly anticipated Saturday Night Live hosting appearances in years on Dec. 21, returning to the show that made him a star 35 years after he left. Next up after that, he’s hoping to host the 2020 Oscars. He was originally tapped for the gig in 2012, but stepped down in a move of solidarity when the show’s producer and his creative partner, Brett Ratner resigned from the job after making crude remarks.
“Eddie is ready to get back into the swing of things. Doing Coming To America 2, going back to SNL and starting to pursue stand up again has got his creative juices overflowing! A few years ago he was thinking of starting a standup comeback and it was going to start with hosting the Oscars, but once that fell through he put it on it all on the wayside. But he never forgot how badly he wanted to do the Oscars,” a source tells HollywoodLife.com EXCLUSIVELY.
“And he has been thinking of how cool it would be to do it this year to make up for not doing it in the past. He wants to talk to producers to see if something can be done as he feels it would be a really magical and fun experience to perform and host in front of all his peers,” our insider adds. The Oscars infamously went without a host in 2019 after comedian Kevin Hart stepped down for refusing to apologize yet again for years-old homophobic tweets and a replacement couldn’t be found.
Eddie revealed in September that he’s planing on mounting a standup comedy comeback in 2020. His 1987 standup documentary Eddie Murphy Raw is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedy routines of all time, so for him to be back to telling epic jokes onstage would be such a treat. “Next year I am going to tour, do some standup,” Eddie revealed while speaking on the “Present Company with Krista Smith” Netflix podcast. He didn’t go into details, but the fact that he’s stepping back into standup after decades away is something so many fans are looking forward to.