EXCLUSIVE
BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F After 30 years, Axel Foley returns to the screen to deliver quips and chaos in Mark Molloy’s fourquel...
A new Beverly Hills Cop movie has been in the works for a long time. Various scripts have been written and discarded over the years, but exactly three decades on from the John Landis-directed third film, a fourth iteration – Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – has finally landed.
‘It’s taken a long time to find the magic recipe for Eddie Murphy to come back and play Axel Foley,’ says debut director Mark Molloy, acknowledging the project’s long history. A fan of the franchise himself, he believes this film making it to production hinges on one thing: the script. ‘It gave me everything I wanted from a Beverly Hills Cop film but it also gave me something that I didn’t expect. There’s an emotional undercurrent to the story that really drew me in and I felt that we had a chance to see Axel Foley in a light we’ve never seen before.’
Murphy serves as a producer on the film as well as returning to the lead role, and Molloy explains that he had a strong vision for the legacy sequel from the beginning. ‘It’s been 30 years since he last played Axel Foley, but he still had such a strong awareness of the character and of what the film should be.’
Foley may be returning to Beverly Hills, but this sequel takes the charismatic cop into some unfamiliar territory – fatherhood. In fact, his return to LA is prompted by his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) coming under threat. She’s not the only new addition to the cast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Bobby, a detective who happens to be Jane’s ex-boyfriend, and Kevin Bacon takes on the role of the BHPD’s Captain Grant.
Some things, however, remain the same, and one of those things is Axel Foley’s demeanour. ‘He’s kind of grown up, but he hasn’t grown up – he’s still causing chaos everywhere he goes,’ Molloy grins.
Another crucial consistency is a number of returning cast members, including Judge Reinhold’s Billy Rosewood. ‘I had a meeting with all the original cast,’ the director recalls of getting the gang back together. ‘I told them my vision for the film and the respect I had for the franchise and everything like that, and my approach to the film, and they all bought [into] it instantly.’
One thing he knew needed to happen for the sequel to work was to find the right person to play Axel’s daughter, Jane. ‘To go toe to toe with Eddie Murphy is a very, very hard thing to do,’ he says, but Taylour Paige did it. ‘I saw a spark, a thing within her that I felt could be really special with Eddie.’
Jane’s clearly a fiery personality, and Molloy even goes so far as to describe her as Axel’s ‘kryptonite’. ‘We’ve seen Axel Foley deal with a whole range of bad
