Rick Ross lives like a king — figuratively and (sorta) literally. Variety reports that the fictional Zamundan palace in Coming 2 America, which released today on Amazon Prime, is actually the Carol City, Florida rapper’s estate on the outskirts of Atlanta. Jefferson Sage, the film’s production designer, detailed how the rapper’s home came to stand in as the royal palace in a fictional nation where much of the film’s fish-out-water action takes place.
“Our big problem was, where do we find a house that had the scale of the possibilities for a very lavish palace?” he explained. “That entrance foyer with the big two-story interior and double-winding staircase was perfect. Off of that, there were two beautiful big rooms with giant windows and 18-foot ceilings. We used five key spaces that we turned into Zamunda.” The spaces that they used included the dining room and Ross’s own bedroom which stands in for the royal chambers.
Ross himself was so amused and impressed by the set dressings, he wound up keeping them. “They changed the wallpaper in the dining room so I asked them to keep it up there,” he noted. “They also created that huge dining room table for a dining scene that seats 50-60 people, and they left that for me as a gift. It’s humungous.” Other changes included adding “so much gold leafing that we bought out the country’s supply for at least two months,” according to Sage, and well as some visual effects.
According to Variety, the 45,000 square-foot, 12-bedroom mansion sits on 235 acres outside Fayetteville, GA. It was previously owned by Evander Holyfield.