Look. Eternals wasn’t good. You know it, The A.V. Club knows it (we gave it a C+), director Chloé Zhao knows it, and Kumail Nanjiani certainly knows it. “The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it,” the actor said of the film, in which he played an immortal being named Kingo, during an appearance on the “Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum” podcast (via Variety). “I was reading every review and checking too much.”
Initially, the negative feedback was a surprise to both Nanjiani and the rest of the team. “It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, so they lifted the embargo early and put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour to promote the movie right as the embargo lifted,” the actor continued.
In reality, while the film did okay at the box office, the critics at those fancy movie festivals didn’t take kindly to the overstuffed plot and CGI stunts. At a mere 47%, the film spent a time as the lowest-rated MCU property to ever grace Rotten Tomatoes, before Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania snatched away that unhappy honor in 2o23.
If you recall, this was also the movie that Nanjiani got absolutely ripped for, a process he said not only drastically altered his relationship with food but also invited a level of unwanted scrutiny on his body that he had never previously experienced. (“It felt reductive, it felt naked, it felt vulnerable. And it made it so that the discussion of my body exists in the public sphere.”) On top of all that, the press tour also happened in 2021 when the world was still crawling out of peak pandemic isolation. Everything just felt very “heightened,” in the actor’s words.
“This thing had become too much in my head... I’m like, ‘OK, this is going to be the coming out party, I’ve worked so hard for this,’” he said. “It was really, really hard, and that was when I was like, ‘This is unfair to me, [and] it’s unfair to [my wife] Emily. I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some shit has got to change.’ So very intentionally, I did start counseling.”
While it sounds like Nanjiani handled all of this in a really healthy way (how many of us can say the same for our own mental health in 2021?), he also revealed that some of the pain is still lingering; he still talks to his therapist about it. “Emily says that I do have trauma from it,” he said. “We actually just got dinner with somebody else from that movie and we were like, ‘That was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”
Our best advice? Try your hardest not to look at the comments. It never ends well. In the meantime, Nanjiani has four upcoming credits that will hopefully fare better with critics: Ella McCay (a comedy from James L. Brooks co-starring Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Woody Harrelson, and Ayo Edebiri), A Guy Walks Into A Bar (alongside Sam Rockwell), Thread: An Insidious Tale (a spinoff of the Insidious franchise), and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Fingers crossed these press tours lead to positive conversations in therapy this time.