A Not-So-Nutty Buddy -- Eddie Murphy Plays Wildman Buddy Love - And Shows A New, Sensitive Side In `Nutty Professor'

Could Eddie Murphy be growing up? The baddest brat of the "Saturday Night Live" pack, the flippant Axel Foley of the "Beverly Hills Cop" movies was downright serene during a recent interview in San Francisco.

There is further evidence of this attitude adjustment. Last month, he publicly apologized for past rude remarks about gays and AIDS. Next he and his wife, Nicole, pop up on the cover of sedate Parade magazine, with the headline, "We're just a boring couple."

Did some kind of cosmic shift occur that the rest of us missed?

And then, a group of savvy journalists spot it, the new tattoo on his arm. The rebel comedian lives! It's a rock, surrounded by water, with a word etched across the top. He lifts his sleeve to reveal the word - it's, it's FAMILY.

A tribute to Nicole and their three young children. He got it in San Francisco on his wedding anniversary.

In town filming "Metro," Murphy took some time out to talk about his current movie, "The Nutty Professor," a remake of the 1963 Jerry Lewis chestnut opening today. He was dressed in black from head to toe, with a tiny gold earring in one ear eclipsed by his chunky gold rings and watch. His voice was soft, almost to the point of a whisper.

The comedian jumped on the project the day after producer Brian Grazer acquired the rights in 1993. He pitched a twist on the original: Make Sherman Klump drastically overweight, instead of a chemistry geek as Lewis played him.

"I'm sure it came out of watching television and realizing so much of what comes out of the TV is about weight loss, and getting in shape, and fat-free and exercise machines," says Murphy. "It's so much a part of our culture. Everybody wants to look a certain way and have a certain body."

The actor spent four hours a day to become Sherman, having rubber blubber attached to his face, and putting on his 50-pound fat suit. The old Eddie at this point would have fired off a good five minutes worth of fat jokes. The new Eddie shares instead his newfound empathy for what the obese go through.

"That was fun for me, because I've never played a person who was on the receiving end of abuse," he says. "I usually play like fast-talking, brash characters, you know. I'm as vulnerable as the next person, so it was fun to be able to play someone like that. I don't want to be that Axel Foley persona in every movie that I do."

Murphy was especially struck by one scene in the movie, when Klump goes out on a first date with a beautiful colleague, played by Jada Pinkett ("Menace II Society," "Jason's Lyric"). They go to a comedy club, where the comic who's more Eddie-like than Eddie seizes on the professor's plumpness for most of his routine. You can see the self-esteem drain out of the man like air from a balloon.

"If you're an obese person, 400 pounds - people don't even know they're being mean," he says. "That's your every day. So Sherman's constantly taking this stuff and it just rolls off his shoulders, and he's still cheerful."

Murphy naturally plays the other half of "The Nutty Professor's" Jekyll-Hyde equation, the smooth-talking Buddy Love, a guy so pumped through with male hormones he can hardly see straight. Plus he's created a whole casting-couch worth of other characters, from a Richard Simmons look-alike to Klump's entire dysfunctional family, who gather round the dinner table for some hilarious scenes over fried chicken with all the fixin's.

Those years doing stand-up and impressions such as Buckwheat and Gumby for "Saturday Night Live" groomed him for this workout, he says. "My training is being schizophrenic."

Indeed. Murphy hasn't always been the model of decorum. An interview with Barbara Walters comes to mind, in which he made her sit on the floor of his furniture-less living room, refusing to be funny no matter how much she prodded. His 1987 stand-up film, "Eddie Murphy Raw," is chock-full o' raunch, and there are stories about his infamous entourage. (There were a couple of guys lurking during this interview.)

"I've had my periods when I wasn't grounded," says Murphy. "Anytime you see me in a leather suit with a leather glove with a ring on the outside of the glove, at that period I'm not grounded."

He bristles at suggestions that this could be his comeback film. The media has put that label on just about everything he's done during the long dry spell following "48 HRS." and the "Beverly Hills Cop" trilogy. He contends, with definite defensiveness, that he's the only actor in Hollywood, black or white, whose movies always make money. Even when he was riding high, he says, he wasn't getting a lot of offers.

"I'm kind of like this `Road Warrior' junk ship," says Murphy. "Even when I had big, big, big, big hit movies, it wasn't like I had a stack of scripts. If I didn't write, if I weren't a writer, I wouldn't have done a movie since `The Golden Child.' "

But he's confident about "The Nutty Professor," as is director Tom Shadyac, who describes both Lewis and Murphy as "incredibly explosive, brilliant comic minds."

"What's so brilliant about what Jerry Lewis did with the original `Nutty Professor' is that he saw the comic possibilities of Jekyll and Hyde," says Murphy. "And when he turned that into a love story and had his alter ego pursuing a woman, that gave it elements of `Cyrano.' At the bottom of this movie are these classic stories that always work."