The disgusting reason Lisa Velez was ‘banned’ from working with Eddie Murphy: “You are not going to do that”
In the first half of the 1980s, Eddie Murphy went from being the breakout star of the worst season of Saturday Night Live to the leading man of Beverly Hills Cop, the biggest movie of 1984. In between, he also starred in 48 Hrs and Trading Places, cementing a truly astonishing rise to the top of the comedy mountain in Hollywood.
By the time the late ’80s rolled around, Murphy’s star had risen even further thanks to a Beverly Hills Cop sequel, the action fantasy The Golden Child, and his phenomenally successful stand-up comedy film Raw, which is, to this day, still the highest-grossing stand-up performance ever released in cinemas. With everything he touched turning to gold, it’s no surprise that he was paid a massive $8million for starring in Coming to America, not to mention being granted an unprecedented level of creative control over the project.
For one thing, Murphy was allowed to pick the director of the movie, a romantic comedy about Prince Akeem Joffer of the fictional African nation of Zamunda coming to New York City in the hopes of finding an American woman who will love him for his personality, not his status as royalty. He chose to re-team with his Trading Places director, John Landis, and even though their second collaboration was far from smooth sailing—they had a “tussling confrontation” at one point—the fruits of their labour yielded another hugely successful comedy blockbuster.
In the movie, the unknown Shari Headley played Lisa McDowell, the object of Akeem’s affections. However, this wasn’t the original plan. Instead, Murphy wanted to cast a pop superstar who was only three years removed from shooting to fame with the song ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home’. This was Lisa Velez, frontwoman of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, but to everyone’s shock, she turned down the opportunity. It was only in recent years, though, that Velez admitted it wasn’t her choice to say no; instead, she was banned from being in the film.
“We were hanging out, Eddie and I, back in the day with Mike Tyson,” Velez claimed to the New York Post in 2025, adding, “I remember when he wanted to do a rom-com, he wanted to test it out.” By this, Velez means that Murphy wanted to do a screen test to see if they had romantic chemistry on-camera. She must have passed with flying colours, because she was soon offered the part and sent a full script. However, when she told her husband John Yulfo the good news, his reaction took her aback.
“God, me being the Latina that I am, and a young female,” she lamented to People magazine, “I asked—dummy that I was—I asked my then-husband. I said, ‘Look, this is what I want to do’, and he said, ‘No, you are not going to do that’.” Why did Yulfo not want his wife to accept the female lead in a major motion picture starring the hottest comedy actor in the business? Well, because he’d heard Murphy had a “crush” on his wife, and he didn’t want to risk her falling for him on set.
Naturally, this was an incredibly insulting, controlling, and sexist stance to take, but Velez was, by her own admission, naïve at the time, so she reluctantly told Murphy he’d have to hire someone else. “Can you believe it?” she exclaimed, “Dummy! But that’s OK. Things happen for a reason. The actress who played Lisa, she was fantastic and still is.”
Thankfully, all things considered, Velez came to her senses pretty quickly and after a short three-year marriage, she divorced Yulfo in 1991. Still, the thought of what could have been has plagued her from time to time, as she confessed, “I thought I was doing the right thing, you know, being a good wife. But I’ve asked myself ‘why’ like 100 times”.
