Kumail Nanjiani Entered Therapy After Marvelously Bad ‘Eternals’ Reviews
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In a review, Rolling Stone warned moviegoers that the 2021 Marvel movie Eternals “will bore you to death.” Moviegoers were somewhat kinder, giving the picture a solid C+, or 77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and they spent close to $165 million domestically to see it, according to The Numbers. But the stigma of being associated with one of the meh-est Marvel movies weighed heavily on one of its stars, Kumail Nanjiani, who entered therapy when critics turned on it.
“The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it,” the actor recently said on the Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum podcast (via People). “I was reading every review and checking too much. This thing had become too much in my head — this was also right after the pandemic, so we’re coming out after this crazy thing and I’m like, ‘OK, this is going to be the coming out party, I’ve worked so hard for this.'”
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He self-assessed and realized that that kind of masochism just wasn’t good for his mental health, so he sought help. “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,'” he said, referring to Emily V. Gordon, with whom he cowrote The Big Sick (which Rolling Stone called “the funniest date movie of 2017”). “‘I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some shit has got to change.’ So very intentionally, I did start counseling.
“I still talk to my therapist about that” he continued. “Emily says that I do have trauma from it. Actually, Emily and I just got dinner with somebody else from that movie and we were like, ‘Man, that was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”
Eternals focused on Earth-bound aliens who emerge from obscurity to fight a threat to humanity called the Deviants. Nanjiani played Kingo, one of the good guys. “While Kingo (Nanjiani) is off in Mumbai fashioning himself into a one-man dynasty of Bollywood icons,” Rolling Stone’s review reads, “Druig (Barry Keoghan), a controller of minds, hides out in a jungle with a colony of laborers in his keep, and Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) — the MCU’s first deaf superhero and, for my money, the smartest Eternal of the lot — hides out in the supergroup’s spaceship to wait out the centuries until it’s time to go home.”
The Chloé Zhao–directed picture also starred Gemma Chan, Brian Tyree Henry, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie, among others. People reports it closed out 2021 as the 11th highest-grossing movie of the year.
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