Kumail Nanjiani has revealed that he was so affected by bad reviews for his 2021 Marvel film Eternals that it took a toll on his mental health and he had to go to counselling.
The Oscar-nominated screenwriter said that he had transformed his entire physique and spent months in training to prepare for the role.
“I had the best time doing that movie, and I realised this is how work should feel like,” Nanjiani said during an appearance on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast. “However, when that movie came out and the reviews were not good, that was very, very tough for me and I realised that too much of how I am evaluating what I want to do is based on the result of what other people think of it.”
He added, “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. So, we had to travel the world while they thought we’d be going on a wave of raves and it wasn’t true. The reviews were really bad.”
Directed by Chloe Zhao, Eternals also featured Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Kit Harington, among others.
Nanjiani said that he read many reviews, and it ended up affecting his mental health, adding, “I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie. 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 counselling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
