Eddie Murphy refused to include iconic banana gag in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

Eddie Murphy fought to keep a reference to the iconic banana exhaust pipe joke from ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ out of his new movie.

The 63-year-old actor was more than happy to reprise his role as Axel Murphy in ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ but was disappointed to learn the production team wanted to include a reference to the scene from the original 1984 flick where his character foils pursuing police officers by putting a banana in their car’s exhaust pipe.

During a roundtable discussion with his co-stars for Netflix, the comedian said: “I fought to make sure there would be no banana in the tailpipe, up until the very last day of the movie.

“Whenever we hit a little speed bump, and we needed a joke or something, the director said, ‘How about the banana in the tailpipe?’, ‘No, no, we can’t do it.’ ‘You know, but the people really want to see that.’

“I said “No, they don’t.”

While he found some of the production to be tricky, Eddie was very impressed with his co-star Kevin Bacon, who plays the baddie Captain Cade Grant in the action picture and hailed the Hollywood icon for making his character a “great villain”.

Speaking on ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’, the ‘Coming to America’ star said: “He is the perfect villain. One of the things that makes ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ work is the first two ‘Beverly Hills Cops’ are really good, and the third one is a little soft. And it's because we didn't have a great villain.

“And now you've got this great villain in Kevin Bacon. I don't know what it is about leading men who do villain roles, he's got this great, great villain.”

The ‘Footloose’ star gushed that he ticked off working with Eddie from his bucket list, and shared how the actor was very attentive with his casemates.

He told People magazine: “He really watches the person that he is working with.

“I’d noticed that he will pick up on some little thing that the other person is doing or saying or whatever, and kind of put it back to them.

“It was great. I loved working with him.”