Watch Marlon Wayans's Leaked Richard Pryor Audition Tape
This weekend, ET confirmed that Eddie Murphy is in talks to play Richard Pryor’s father in Lee Daniels’s upcoming Pryor biopic. Mike Epps will star as the groundbreaking stand-up comic, but from 2010 to 2013, comedian Marlon Wayans was attached to the role. This unexpectedly emotional footage of Wayans’ audition recently leaked online, and it shows just how far the star of Scary Movie and The Heat was willing to push himself to play the troubled comic genius. At the time this audition was taped, Bill Condon was set to write and direct the biopic, with Chris Rock producing. According to Shadow and Act, the first half of the video is a scene written by Condon (featuring Omar Epps as the psychiatrist), while the second half is an actual Pryor monologue. Both go to dark places, touching on Pryor’s cocaine addiction, his abuse of his wife Jennifer Lee (one Pryor’s five wives from seven marriages), and his traumatic childhood.
One of the most influential comedians ever, Pryor, who died from multiple sclerosis in 2005, has yet to receive a proper big-screen biopic. Various incarnations of his life story have been in development for two decades, beginning in 1995, when Damon Wayans (Marlon’s older brother) signed on to star in an adaptation of Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences. (The film was never made and the book was eventually adapted as a cable TV special.) In 2010, Condon’s film, titled Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?, went into development, and was rumored to star Eddie Murphy before the role was offered to Wayans. At the time, Rock told MTV News that Wayans’s screen test (possibly the same one that appears above) was “amazing,” and Wayans told the Los Angeles Times that he had waited all his life for an opportunity like this one.
“This is like an invitation to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for me, and I’ve never been more excited in my life than when I got the role,” said Wayans. “I want to be in dramas, I want to produce, I want to write and I want to prove I can handle a role such as this one.”
Unfortunately for Wayans, Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said? never got the green light, and Condon moved on to directing Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and 2. When the project was revived in 2013, Wayans was reportedly in consideration once again, along with Mike Epps, Nick Cannon and Michael B. Jordan. In August, director Lee Daniels announced that Epps had won the coveted part. Like Wayans, Epps has a long history with the role of Richard Pryor: He was developing a biopic with Pryor’s wife Jennifer Lee in 2005, before the comedian’s death, and also plays Pryor in the as-yet-unreleased Nina Simone film Nina.
“I think Mike has a rawness about him that is very similar to Richard’s rawness,” Lee, a producer on the new film, told Madame Noir in February. “Nick is a delightful person, I think he’s a very nice guy and I think the same of Marlon, but I don’t feel their rawness. That’s not an insult, it’s just a fact. Some people look kind of shattered when they walk into a room and Mike’s got that vulnerability and you can identify that.”
Daniels’s biopic, which counts Oprah Winfrey among its producers, will also star Kate Hudson as Jennifer Lee.
