Key points
Eddie Murphy says he and Pete Davidson found “a bunch of stuff in common” while filming The Pickup.
Davidson says that the two Saturday Night Live alums bonded over long reenactments of Rocky: “We were just two bros.”
Their costar Keke Palmer didn’t join in on the fun: “I literally felt like I was with my uncles.”
What is male friendship but a collection of sports movie quotes?
In their new action-comedy movie The Pickup, Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson play armored truck drivers who are reluctantly pulled into a casino heist when a burglar (Keke Palmer) hijacks their vehicle. The comedians tell Entertainment Weekly that they became fast friends on set.
“Pete and I have a bunch of stuff in common,” Murphy says. “We both come from stand-up comedy. We both got on Saturday Night Live really young. We both lost our dads when we were, you know, seven, eight years old.”
One point of connection between the two SNL alums: a shared admiration for the Italian Stallion himself, Rocky Balboa.
“Eddie has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, and so do I — where I know every line to every Rocky, Jaws, Sopranos,” Davidson tells EW. “So we would just quote movies all day — Rodney Dangerfield and all this type of stuff. We had a great time.”
Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios
Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson in ‘The Pickup’
The King of Staten Island actor says that he’s constantly muttering iconic movie lines to himself for no apparent reason. “I have this thing where I’ll just be sitting alone and just start being like, ‘My house, my house stink? That’s right, it stinks!'” Davidson says, quoting an exchange between Sylvester Stallone’s titular boxer and his on-screen trainer, Burgess Meredith’s Mickey. “And Eddie caught it, and then he continued and did the Mickey lines, and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God. He doesn’t think I’m a giant weirdo.'”
Davidson also says that he and Murphy constantly invoked Carl Weathers’ rival boxer whenever they finished a day of shooting with director Tim Story. “Every time we would wrap for the day, Tim would be like, ‘I’ll see you guys tomorrow!'” he recalls. “And we’d do the Apollo Creed line where he goes, ‘There is no tomorrow. There is no tomorrow.'”
Palmer says that the chemistry between her two costars was off the charts. “They were very, very buddy-buddy — so much so that I was like, ‘Am I even in the room?'” she tells EW. “I didn’t even know how much Eddie was vibing with me at first because I was just being so chill, so it was interesting just seeing Pete and Eddie go back and forth and back and forth. I’m like, ‘Damn, if only I was a man!'”
Davidson says that his referential rapport with Murphy extended beyond the boxing classic. “Some days it would be Sopranos, some days it would be Rocky, some days it would be Jaws,” he recalls. “And poor Keke would just be sitting there in the middle of us while we were just quoting lines — not for 30 seconds, but, like, eight-minute runs of all these movies.”
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Keke Palmer in ‘The Pickup’
Palmer confirms her befuddlement. “It was very light and fun, but they’re talking about Rocky,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t even care about Rocky!’ You know what I mean? They’re going back and forth on stuff and all these different types of things that they know, and I literally felt like I was with my uncles.”
Davidson says that the Rocky banter sometimes inhibited production. “We’d be like, ‘Hey, are we supposed to be filming right now?’ And Tim would be like, ‘Yeah, we’re like waiting for you guys to stop — stop doing lines from other movies!'” he remembers. “But I think everybody really enjoyed it. They were just laughing at these two, two silly guys that love quoting movies together. We were just two bros.”
Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios
Pete Davidson, Eddie Murphy, and Keke Palmer in ‘The Pickup’
Murphy and Davidson first briefly worked together when the Beverly Hills Cop star returned to host SNL in 2019 while Davidson was still a cast member. “I had interacted with him when I met him a couple of times when I went back to SNL,” Murphy says. “And I was just aware of him.”
Murphy wanted to team up with Davidson after seeing the Bupkis star discuss discovering his 1983 standup special Delirious while hosting SNL in 2023. “I told that story in the cold open, and I think he saw it, and then I think he thought it would be a good fit,” Davidson says. “Being told Eddie wants you to be in a movie with him is ridiculous. I was just like, what world am I in?”
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The Coming to America star was attracted to the inherent comedic differences between himself and Davidson. “The stuff that makes the movie work is opposites,” Murphy says. “With comedies, you gotta have the opposites. The fat and skinny is what it was back in the day. If you got a fat guy and a skinny guy, and one of them is annoying — that almost always works. You have that with Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello, and the Fresh Prince and his uncle. You get a fat guy and a skinny guy and two opposites, you know, and it works.”
For The Pickup, the primary oppositional force between Murphy and Davidson is age. “There’s this generation gap between the characters: he’s single and he’s having wild sex on the weekend with strangers. whereas I’m married and it’s my anniversary,” Murphy says. “And then he’s tall— he’s 6’3″ and I’m 5’10”, and he’s white and I’m Black. What makes it pop when we get together and what makes us have chemistry is that we’re totally opposites.”
Amazon MGM Studios
Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, and Tim Story filming ‘The Pickup’
Despite her disinterest in Rocky lore, Palmer says that she loved witnessing the connection between Davidson and Murphy. “It was the amazing chemistry that you didn’t know you needed,” she says. “We’ve gotten to see Eddie when he was being funny at 19 and when he was being funny in his twenties, thirties, forties, and he evolved as an artist as he aged.”
She continues, “He went from being that crazy, ratty kid that’s getting into too much trouble to being the father figure. Now, being the older guy that’s been around the block, he can show you a thing or two. And so it was really cool to see him playing that in this stage in his life. And then to see Pete getting to be the young buck that’s just trying to figure it out — it was really, really cool to see that.”
The Pickup is now streaming on Prime Video.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
