All three actors appeared on Saturday Night Live. Murphy and Belushi were both cast members of the show during the 1980s while Williams hosted some of the episodes and made cameos on SNL in the same decade. Murphy said that he could only tell the story now that the other two had passed on.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter on its Awards Chatter podcast, Murphy claimed that he once refused drugs from Robin Williams and John Belushi.
He was 18 and working in a blues bar when he was approached by the pair, who were with Dan Ackroyd.
‘Belushi and Robin Williams offered me some blow and I didn’t take it,’ he said. ‘And Belushi called me a ‘tightass.’
‘Then years later years later, I was like ‘Wow, that’s a trip’ – just think how none of this s*** would have happened… The Eddie Murphy story would have been totally different.
‘I admired both these guys, I [was] 18 years old, just as easily as I said ‘Nah’, I could’ve said ‘Alright’ and tried it. It just didn’t happen and years later…’
Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982 while Williams, who battled with cocaine and alcohol addiction, checked himself into rehab shortly before he died by suicide in 2014.
Eddie Murphy remains sober to this day, and said: ‘I don't drink – I don't have like this moral thing about it, I just don't do it.
‘There are a bunch of things like that that I look back on and be like, 'Wow.' And that just reaffirms my faith. I know that God is real. There's been a bunch of times when I could have wound up crashing and burning. I just stepped over here right on time.’
