Kumail Nanjiani is recalling the release of Marvel‘s Eternals and revealing he had to go to counseling following the negative reviews the Chloé Zhao film received.
“I had the best time doing that movie, and I realized 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 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.”
Eternals was released in 2021, and it starred Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Kit Harington, among others. The film currently has a 47% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
“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 right as the embargo lifted,” he added.
“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,” Nanjiani said.
The actor 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 counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
