Judge Reinhold on Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F: ‘I’m proud to play a cop’
Judge Reinhold is working up to a punchline. “The day before Beverly Hills Cop came out,” he says, leaning back in the chair in a plush executive-looking studio 5,000 miles away from me, “I had to take two forms of ID to the bank!”
He looks at me.
I look back, politely. For the past 20 minutes, I’ve been trying to lead him somewhere with my questions and he’s staunchly refused to go there.
“That’s how anonymous I was,” he adds, to help me out.
Oh, I say. I see. Well-practised anecdotes hang between us like a heavy curtain, frustratingly obscuring the man behind them.
It’s been a long time since Judge Reinhold was anonymous. We are meeting to talk about Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the fourth instalment of Eddie Murphy’s maverick Detroit cop’s crime-fighting escapades in the 90210 zip code. When the original action-comedy was released in 1984, it catapulted Reinhold briefly into superstardom as the naive, overlooked detective Billy Rosewood. Beverly Hills Cop was a box office sensation with a killer soundtrack, and spawned two sequels over the following decade. By Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), the shtick was wearing thin and the franchise scampered zanily to an end.
