Marvel’s Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani has admitted that, thanks to developing an obsession with constantly checking its public reception, he had to seek counseling following the film’s release to learn how to mentally steel himself against its absolute trashing at the hands of critics.
Nanjiani, who appeared in what is considered by many to be the MCU’s worst entry as the franchise’s live-action take on the Eternal warrior Kingo, opened up about his Marvel-inspired mental health struggles during a February 6th appearance on Smallville star Michael Rosenbaum’s eponymous, interview-centric podcast, Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum.
At one point during their time together, the pair eventually found themselves on the topic of mental health, with both actors sharing their own personal struggles with anxiety.
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To this end, Nanjiani informed his host that one of the biggest changes he had made in service of bettering his mental health was the way in which he approached making decisions regarding his career.
“I was looking at it like, ‘Okay, if I do this, this movie is going to come out in theaters, it’s going to be a big hit, then I’ll get more,'” reflected the Marvel actor. “I was always results based on my decision making, for like those three years or so. And then I realized, you know, I did stuff that should have been a home run and then it wasn’t.”
In providing an example of such career misses, Nanjiani unsurprisingly put a spotlight on his aforementioned Marvel debut, telling Rosenbaum, “Like Eternals – it was an Oscar winning director, one of the craziest casts, you had legends, you had Salma Hayek, you had Angelina Jolie, you had new people who are amazing – Brian Tyreek Henry, Barry Keogon, who have both been nominated for Oscars – I was like, “This is going to be a slam dunk, and it’ll be great, it’ll open all the stuff for me.”
“Going into it was great for me because I was like, ‘I need to have fun doing this movie’, and so I just did,” he further detailed. “I was like, ‘I understand this movie in my bones. I understand sci-fi, I understand like, sci-fi epics’, so I had the best time doing that movie.”
However, though he was elated that this more ‘fun’ approach to his work had led him to realize “this is what work should feel like,” Nanjiani admitted that this joy was ultimately short-lived thanks to the fact that “when that movie came out, and the reviews weren’t good, that was very very tough for me.”
“I realized that too much of how I’m evaluating what I want to do is based on the results of what other people think of it,” said the actor.
Following a brief detour onto the topic of both actors’ respective relationships with Guardians of the Galaxy series star Dave Bautista – Nanjiani having struck-up a good friendship with him during their time working together on Stuber and Rosenbaum having worked alongside the wrestler-turned-actor during his two guest appearances on Smallville – the show’s eponymous eventually returned to the subject of Eternals, asking his guest [Time Stamp: 31:00], “When you talk about Eternals, and it wasn’t the response that you were hoping, how did that effect you? Did it really consume you for a while? Was it something you had to get counseling on? Was it something where you took it to heart, like, ‘Was it me?'”
In turn, Nanjiani asserted, “I knew it wasn’t me. I think that there were a lot of things that went into it. I love that movie. I’m very proud of that movie. I’m proud of everyone’s work in it and I’m proud of my work in it, and I’ve seen that movie a bunch of times because it’s like, my kind of movie. And I don’t watch stuff I’m in – a lot of stuff I”m in, I’ve never watched.”
“It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be like, really, really well reviewed and so they lifted the [review] embargo really early and they also put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big like, global tour promoting the movie right as the embargo was lifted,” he continued. “And so we had to like sort of travel the world while they thought we would be going on a wave of raves, but it wasn’t true. The reviews were really bad.”
Pressed by a shocked Rosenbaum for confirmation as to the fact that he was “aware of [the bad press] while you were on tour,” Nanjiani admitted, “I was aware of it – I was TOO aware of it.”
“I was reading every review, I was checking too much, because this thing had become too much in my head,” he recalled. “This was also right after the pandemic, you know, so we’re coming out after this crazy thing and I’m like ‘Okay, this is going to be the coming out party. I worked so hard for this.'”
“I don’t know,” the Obi-Wan Kenobi actor opined. “I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not very much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie. It was really really hard.”
However, rather than continue to stew on Marvel’s then-latest disaster, Nanjiani said that he came to yet another poignant realization.
“And that’s when I was like, ‘This is unfair to me, this is unfair to [my wife] Emily [V. Gordon], I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some s–t’s got to change.”
“And so very intentionally I did start counseling – I still talk to my therapist about that,” he told the the voice of Justice League/Unlimited‘s animated version of The Flash. “Emily says that, you know, I do have trauma from it. Emily and I just got dinner with someone else from that movie and we were like ‘Man, that was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that was really tough.'”
Winding down his thoughts on his disappointing Marvel ride, Nanjiani ultimately affirmed to Rosenbaum, “I think we all went through something kind of similar – and this guy that, I’m talking about, he’s truly one of the best actors of our generation and has been nominated for an Oscar since then – so I realized I can’t be so results based in my work anymore because I can’t really control it.”
“I can control my experience,” he concluded. “I can control how I am to the people around me. I can control what I learn from it. I can control how I work. I can’t control what people are going to think of it.”