Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall Claim Paramount Forced Them to Cast a White Person in Coming to America

Playing Saul in the barbershop wasn’t quite enough for the studio, apparently.

According to Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, Paramount forced them to cast a white person in “Coming to America”.

On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel asked the duo how Louis Anderson came to be involved in the original film, and Hall told him they didn’t have much of a choice.

“I love Louie, but I think we were forced to put Louie in it,” he said. “We were forced to put in a white person.”

Murphy immediately confirmed: “Yeah Paramount was like — ’cause the whole cast is Black, and this was back in the ’80s — so it was like ‘We have to have a white person! We can’t do… There has to be a white person in the movie!'”

“I was like: ‘What?'” Murphy recalled, laughing.

“So it was ‘who was the funniest white guy around?’ Louis we knew was cool, so that’s how Louie got in the movie.”

As the host pointed out, being the funniest white person Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall know is a “pretty great distinction.”

“It was really official,” Hall insisted. “I had a list. They gave me a list with three white guys. They said, ‘Who would you rather work with?’ And I pointed to Louie.”

When Kimmel asked if he remembered who the other two guys were, he grinned back: “Oh yeah, but I can’t say.”

Anderson, who played McDowell’s employee Maurice in the OG, returns for the sequel “Coming 2 America”, released on Amazon this Friday.