Comedy superstar wanted to play FSK-18 horror villains: it didn’t happen for this stupid reason!

Ever since “The Curse of Candyman” hit theaters in 1992/93, horror fans have inevitably associated the title character with Tony Todd. The man from Washington DC previously starred in the masterpiece ‘Platoon’ and then in film hits such as Michael Bay’s ‘The Rock’ or four parts of the popular teen horror series ‘Final Destination’. Yet it’s almost always his performance as a ruthless killer that comes first when it comes to Todd’s career.

According to an old genre cliché, African-American characters in horror films are usually the first to die. This does not apply to Candyman, which is based on a short story by British horror master Clive Barker (“Hellraiser”). With “Candyman 2 – The Blood Revenge” and “Candyman 3 – The Day of the Dead” there were even two sequels – again with Todd in the title role. The fans associate the mime so much with the character that even the makers of the reboot ‘Candyman’, which was released in cinemas in 2021 and continues to go its own way, did not dare to hire a new actor. And yet someone had originally planned something completely different…

Eddie Murphy as Candyman?!

Indie production company Propaganda Films (“Wild At Heart,” “Sleepers”) was keen to cast “Beverly Hills Cop” and “48 Hours” star Eddie Murphy in “The Curse of Candy.” Murphy was reportedly actually interested in the role. And not just because he hadn’t worked in horror titles until then. The appeal was probably also that the genre at the time still had almost exclusively white protagonists and that Candyman was something special in this respect.

Murphy also found the character’s background interesting: Director Bernard Rose’s script (“Mr. Nice”) conceived the Candyman as the son of a freed slave. After building a successful career for himself, he fell in love with a white woman, who promptly became pregnant by him. Whereupon the girl’s father had him brutally tortured and murdered. He was chased and one of his hands was sawed off. Finally, he was doused in honey and left to be stung to death by a swarm of bees. But 100 years later he returned to the world of the living as Candyman. If you stood in front of a mirror and said his name five times, he would appear with a hook instead of his right hand and kill you…

What the ladies and gentlemen apparently had not thought about: Murphy was one of the biggest stars in the world in the early 1990s and would not only get her film enormous publicity, but also demand a corresponding compensation. His salary at the time was reportedly between $10 and $15 million per film. However, the makers of “Candyman’s Curse” only had a total of eight million available. Understandably, they quickly decided on another option. Tony Todd was available considerably cheaper.

However, because communication about Murphy was already circulating in the industry and among the horror audience, the producers had to go public with a reason for not signing on. To save face, they apparently couldn’t think of anything better than to announce that they had concluded that Murphy was too small for the role, described in the book as tall and broad-shouldered.

With a height of 176 cm, the comedian is of course not exactly intimidating in real life. But we’re talking about Hollywood here. If, for example, Tom Cruise, who is only 170 cm tall, could be convincingly sold as the gigantic ‘Jack Reacher’, then surely, with the help of ingenuity and effects magic, it would have somehow been possible to portray Eddie Murphy make it look like something more impressive.

Regardless, Todd did a great job and is still the one and only “Candyman” to this day. Murphy, on the other hand, simply fulfilled his wish to play the main character in a horror film himself. A little later, together with his brothers Vernon Lynch and Charles Q. Murphy, he created the story for ‘Vampire In Brooklyn’ and had the film replaced by “Scream” in 1995 – directed by genius Wes Craven.

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