‘Coming 2 America’ wedding dress was so massive, bride Nomzamo Mbatha needed

The following gives details of the climactic “Coming 2 America” wedding. You’re invited to view the Amazon Prime streaming comedy before reading.

Nomzamo Mbatha felt the very image of royalty as she stepped into the stunning wedding gown as Crown Princess Mirembe in “Coming 2 America.”

But there was major problem for five-foot-two Mirembe walking down the aisle in her lavish wedding to royal prince Lavelle Junson (Jermaine Fowler) — actually walking with the stunning 15-foot train made of the African woven fabric ankara flowing behind her.

“I felt like a such princess, the dress was so gorgeous, and I was told ‘OK, try to move.’ And I literally could not move,” says Mbatha, laughing. “Then I tried to walk and I literally couldn’t. The dress weighed 83 pounds.”

The South African actress smiles serenely and seems to move effortlessly in the Zamunda nuptials scene for “Coming 2 America” (now streaming on Amazon Prime). But Mbatha needed help with that dress, a concession to the fictional country’s wedding blow-out tradition.

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In the original 1988 “Coming to America,” Eddie Murphy’s Prince Akeem’s American bride Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley) wore a pink wedding dress with a train that flowed far down the aisle.

“We needed to end it the same way as the original. People remember that dress, the way the train went out the door,” says “Coming 2 America” costume designer Ruth E. Carter. “So we made a dress that filled the aisle side-to-side and went more than 10 feet back. At the same time, we made the new Zamunda dress our own. It was our fairy tale ending.”

Carter estimates that the new dress required 100 yards of fabric to make the ruffled super-train. A separate, special room of Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios became wedding dress HQ, with the tables pushed out to make room.

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“It was insane. The dress was on a mannequin and you couldn’t get inside, because the train filled up the room,” Mbatha says.

The completed full dress had to be rolled to the set on carts. On the set, filmmakers brainstormed ways to make Mbatha’s stalled walk to the altar a reality.

Set workers placed three rolling dollies underneath the train, yet still movement was difficult. “I would go left and the train would go right with the carts,” says Mbatha, who saw her screen groom laughing as her runaway train pushed him out of the camera shot. “Jermaine would be like, ‘You’re pushing me out!’ And I’d be like, ‘It’s the dress. It’s moving on its own.'”