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Obama Asked Eddie Murphy What Hair Dye He Used. Oh, And When He Planned to Return to Stand-Up.

You want your first exchange with President Barack Obama to be classy and timeless — a source of inspiration and quiet reflection for decades to come. If he also asks you how you got your hair looking so good, well, that’s just icing on the cake. While visiting The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Friday to promote his new Netflix’s movie, Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy revealed it was Obama who got him reconsidering a return to stand-up when the pair met in 2015 after the comedian won his Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. “The first thing he asked me was, ‘When are you gonna do stand-up again?,’” Murphy recalled. “So I said, ‘Maybe it’s time to do stand-up again.’”

Of course, there’s only one question more flattering than a president asking you why you aren’t doing stand-up. It’s a president asking how you got your hair so gorgeous and gray-free. “You know what we talked about? He talked about my hair,” Murphy recalled about his encounter with the former POTUS. “He was like, ‘What kind of rinse are you using?’ I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You don’t have any gray hairs.’”

Laughed Murphy, “There’s a great picture I have of me talking to him in the White House, and at that moment he’s going, ‘What kind of rinse do you use?’” For the record, Eddie Murphy does not color his hair, as he only has gray hairs in his mustache and nose, and apparently he just hacks those out. And that’s news any future president can use.

Barack Obama Encouraged Eddie Murphy to Return to Stand-Up