If you’re anything like me, you’ve watched Coming to America many, many times. In fact, I’m psyched that starting on September 1, I’ll be able to watch it over and over with my Peacock subscription. In fact, I plan to, because I just learned how petty one of the most iconic scenes in the movie is, and I need to watch it again. The scene is when Darryl (Eriq La Salle) tosses a milkshake at Akeem (Eddie Murphy), and director John Landis had a little trolling up his sleeve.
La Salle Didn’t Throw The Milkshake
In the movie, Darryl is pretty much the villain, and nothing shows his disdain for Akeem and Semmi (Arsenio Hall) more than when he’s leaving McDowell’s as our two heroes take out the trash. Darryl throws his mostly unfinished strawberry milkshake at Akeem, covering him in ice cream. Landis was determined to make the mess himself. La Salle told a crowd at UCLA’s Hammer Museum (via his TikTok):
So, when Eddie first worked with John Landis, John Landis was the big dog. The second time they worked together, Eddie was the big dog. It was some tension, right? They had to go through some stuff. So [here’s a] tiny little tidbit that you can tell your friends. I wasn’t the one that threw the milkshake. John Landis insisted.
It wasn’t what La Salle had in mind, as he explained:
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The night before, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to throw this milkshake on Eddie Murphy. Cool.’ On the day, John was like, ‘I’ll do it.’
Famously, there was tension between the star of the movie and the director, as both have spoken about it since. Their conflicts went back further, as Coming to America was not the first time Landis and Murphy had teamed up. Landis directed Murphy in the former SNL star’s second movie, Trading Places. Murphy’s star was rising on the heels of SNL and 48 Hrs., but he wasn’t the global superstar he would become, in large part due to Trading Places.
Landis, on the other hand, was already a very in-demand director when he directed Trading Places, with hits like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf in London under his belt. By the time of Coming to America, as La Salle points out, the power dynamic had shifted. Murphy was one of the biggest stars of the ‘80s, and that led, apparently, to even more clashes on set of Coming to America.
It sounds like Landis really needed to release some of that tension by covering Murphy in pink goo, and I suppose it worked, as the two would reunite again for the oft-maligned Beverly Hills Cop III (definitely NOT one of Eddie Murphy’s best movies). That would be the last time the two worked together, however, and they have, at times, fired shots back and forth at each other.