In 1986, after finding success with Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs, 25-year-old Eddie Murphy signed on to a very strange project, Michael Ritchie’s dark fantasy action comedy film, The Golden Child. In the ’80s, the setup for the film sounded pretty standard, but looking back at it today, The Golden Child was a huge gamble. Murphy’s character, Chandler Jarrell, a loud-mouthed Los Angeles social worker, gets recruited by a priestess to trek to Tibet and rescue a mystical child with powers. Except the “boy” at the center of the $149 million grossing film was not a boy at all. Credited as J.L. Reate, her real name is Jasmine Reate. And yes, the Golden Child was a girl.
Reate was only 6 years old when she had to shave her head for one of the biggest roles in Hollywood at the time. But because Hollywood had cast a girl in the role of a boy, they tried to hide it. And so she was credited with a gender-neutral name: J.L. Reate.
And all of this sort of explains why The Golden Child barely spoke on screen.
Still, the film was a huge hit, even though Murphy today questions how good the film actually was. “No matter how I feel, for instance, about The Golden Child, which was a piece of s***, the movie made more than $100 million,” he told Rolling Stone. “So who am I to say it sucks?”
But he wasn’t the only one who thought the film sucked. Critics did too. They tore the Michael Ritchie-directed film apart. But, you know what? Audiences loved it. And, as Murphy would probably say, “a piece of s*** with a nine-figure gross is still a nine-figure gross.”
We know how Murphy’s career panned out. But what happened to the child from the film? Well, she grew up and became a huge success in a very different field.
33 years later, Murphy turned up at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote Dolemite Is My Name. Jasmine Reate, who played the young child, was there too. But she wasn’t an attendee. And it wasn’t some nostalgic trick for the press. She was actually the executive director of events for the festival.
The kid Eddie Murphy once shared a set with was now helping run one of the most respected film events in the world. Thankfully, they met up and had a very short but beautiful reunion. “He was just as kind as I remembered him when I was 6,” Reate said afterward.
Reate’s Instagram describes her very differently than you’d expect. She’s a bespoke professional organiser working across Los Angeles, New York, Carmel and beyond, operating under the handle @jasminreate with the tagline “Organization perfected.”
Yes, it’s probably not the career you’d have predicted for the Golden Child, but then nothing about her story has followed a predictable line so far.
A girl credited as a boy, who grew up to run a film festival, who now organises lives for a living across three cities. She’s no longer a golden child, but a golden woman.
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