Beverly Hills Cop – Almost featured a much different action star
When you think “action star,” Eddie Murphy probably isn’t the first person to come to mind. But Beverly Hills Cop perfected the comedy-action genre, and there’s a reason we’re still talking about it today.
Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is a freewheeling, reckless Detroit cop who heads out to California when his friend is murdered. His friend, Mikey, was living in California, but when he makes a surprise visit to Detroit, he’s killed right in front of his friend Axel by a man named Zack. Axel follows him to Beverly Hills, and with help from the Beverly Hills Police Department, vows to track him down and solve the case. But Axel does things a bit differently than the cops in Beverly Hills.
This film has a surprisingly strong connection to action star Sylvester Stallone. In Detective Billy Rosewood’s (Judge Reinhold) apartment, he has posters of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra hanging up. Both of those movies starred Stallone.
The posters of Stallone probably aren’t a coincidence. Stallone’s then-wife Brigitte Nielsen appears in the film’s sequel as Karla Fry, and Stallone was the original choice to play the lead in the film. When Stallone was attached to the project, he had worked on the script to make it a more straight-forward action movie, and the character’s name would have been Axel Cobretti.
Stallone left the project because he didn’t think he would be believable to audiences as the naive, fish out of water cop, and he didn’t like the comedic direction they wanted to take the film in. That worked out well for Eddie Murphy, at least.