Kumail Nanjiani is opening up about how the failure of Eternals derailed not only his career expectations but also his mental health.
The 47-year-old actor, who played Kingo in Chloé Zhao’s 2021 Marvel film, revealed on Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast that he had signed up for a huge slate of projects with Marvel—including six films, a video game, and even a theme park ride. At the time, he thought Kingo would be a fixture in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be my job for the next 10 years,’” Kumail shared. “I’ll be doing Marvel movies every year and, in between, I’ll do my own little things, whatever I want to do. And then none of that happened.”
Instead, Eternals received poor reviews and underperformed at the box office, leaving those long-term plans abandoned. The sharp contrast between Marvel’s hype and the actual reception hit Kumail especially hard.
“It came out right after COVID, so I had a year and a half at home to just be like, ‘Oh, when this thing comes out!’ But then it came out, and it got really bad reviews, and it didn’t do that well. It shattered me too much. That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go to therapy to figure this out,’” he admitted.
The actor has since incorporated this painful experience into his comedy. In his upcoming stand-up special, he talks about the crash of expectations he faced after putting so much hope into Marvel’s franchise machine.
Kumail has previously described how reading reviews became an unhealthy obsession. On Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, he explained:
“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 reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it. I was reading every review and checking too much.”
Despite the disappointment, Kumail says he’s still proud of the film itself: “I love that movie, and I’m very proud of that movie. I’ve seen it a bunch of times because it’s my kind of movie.”
Ultimately, the fallout made him reevaluate how he approached work and fame. “It was unfair to me and unfair to Emily [V. Gordon, his wife], and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some s***’s gotta change, so I started counseling and I still talk to my therapist about that,” he said.
