Pakistani-American actor-comedian Kumail Nanjiani has finally shared his experience of dealing with the unexpectedly negative reviews of his 2021 Marvel film ‘Eternals’ and the mental strain of promoting the movie amidst harsh critiques. He revealed that the impact was so much that it led him to seek counseling after completing the press circuit for the movie.
During a podcast appearance on ‘Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum,’ Nanjiani went on to applaud his cast and crew and stated that he had “the best time doing that movie and I realized this is how work should feel like.” Soon after, he stated that, “when that movie came out and the reviews weren’t good, that was very, very tough for me and I realized that too much of how I’m evaluating what I want to do is based on the result of what other people think of it.”
When asked about how he felt about the fact that the movie didn’t do well, the ‘Big Sick’ actor said, “It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, and so they lifted the embargo really early and they also put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour promoting the movie.”
He admitted to being “too aware” of the negative reviews, and was actively “reading every review” to an extent that it started impacting his personal life. “It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to [my wife] Emily, and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some s**t has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
“Emily says that I do have trauma from it,” he said, continuing, “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.”
Check out the entire video below:
Released in 2021, the Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao’s ‘Eternals’ is currently rated only 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, marking it as one of the lowest-reviewed entries in the history of the MCU. The epic features a massive star-cast including Nanjiani, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie.
