Charlie Murphy is best known for his raunchy celebrity stories on Chappelle's Show and his stand-up comedy. In the Christmas family film The Perfect Holiday, he plays a divorced dad who keeps disappointing his kids. Don't worry, those disappointments are all because of crazy antics, and they're all age appropriate.

Charlie Murphy!

"It was easy for me to be PG," said Murphy. "As an actor, you just deal with what's in front of you. If what's in front of you is PG, you don't start cursing to make it rated R. Just take the profanity out. If you're a comedian like myself, you just have to rely on your comic timing and turn what you have into something funny without using profanity. You have to learn how to do that because as a comedian, you get to say a lot of stuff in clubs that you can't say on television. So if you want to be a big comedian, you have to learn both. You can't just be the nightclub dude because he can't go on television. That's where I learned it."

Toning down the language wasn't the issue. The issues was that Murphy plays a hip hop artist and had to record his own music. "The only thing that was intimidating to me was the singing part. It was to work with a microphone and sing. What allowed me to do it was we said we're going to approach it as a joke. That takes all the pressure off. Approach it as a joke and that way, when people laugh, they're supposed to be laughing. But then it came out the way it came out and it's not funny. It's like, 'Oh wow, I didn't know he could sing.' What's flattering about that is I didn't know that I could do that. That's actually the part of that scene that I take my glasses off at the end and go I'm shocked that I sounded that good. The way the film was edited, they took that part out. In reality, in real life, I really didn't expect it to come out that good."

The Perfect Holiday

Murphy's character is the foil to both the children's Christmas and a new man (Morris Chestnut)'s romantic attempts with their single mom. He's used to being the bad guy. "If you look at my career, that's what I've done in most of my films. I was the bad guy. What was good about this guy is they humanize it at the end. He wasn't just left like that. So that was one of the things that made me like the role. Another thing was the fact that this guy had relationships with a family. It wasn't just a dude in the street and the story of his business. It showed his family. His family was in turmoil. It was a real family. It was a real thing that had to do with real people. Real people really get divorced. People really do have to acclimate themselves to a stepchild. I had to do that. I had a stepfather and I had a stepchild so I identified with that. That's all real good stuff that's happening in households all across America. That's real stuff so I was like, 'Hey, man, you don't get too many pieces of work that have all this stuff in it and then you're actually integral to showing it.'"

Perhaps showing some range will be good for Murphy's career overall. "It was a good thing to do that because once you do, you get considered to do things that maybe before Perfect Holiday, somebody would go, 'Yeah, Charlie Murphy's funny but he can't be the warm, he can't do that. He does this.' Well, now I show you don't tell me what I can't do. Ask me, 'Can you do this?' Don't just write me off without giving me a shot. That's what this movie is setting up."

The Perfect Holiday opens to theaters on December 12th.

For the trailer, poster, stills and more movie info, go to the The Perfect Holiday Movie Page.