It’s an experience shared by almost all of us, right? You finally meet a celebrity, someone who’s spent years inspiring you to be a better person, who’s taught you a large part of what you know… And their reaction is disappointing: fed up after a hard day at work, they ignore you and go about their business. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Noah Wyle, the star and heart of The Pitt, and it changed his life forever.
Wyle you were doing that…
The story goes back to long before ER, when Wyle was just 9 years old and ran into Murphy by chance: “I met Eddie when I was a kid. I asked him for his autograph and I told him ‘I love you on Saturday Night Live.’ He told me ‘What are you doing up this late?’”. It’s not the reaction you’d expect, but then it gets worse. Much worse.
Little Wyle, as he tells it, asked him for his autograph, to which the comic simply replied “Go fuck yourself, man”. As kind as you’d expect with a young fan, as you can see. Luckily, it served as a life lesson: “I always sign an autograph. If a 9-year-old kid needs me to sign one, I do it as fast as I can”.
The good thing is that he can see the humor in it: “I told this story at home and last year, for my birthday, my daughter didn’t know what to get me. My 10-year-old daughter printed out a photo of Eddie Murphy and wrote ‘Dear Noah, you’re a good boy, Eddie Murphy’. And I have it framed in my office”. And that’s how you know you’re raising incredible people.
