The negative reviews of Marvel’s film Eternals had a severe impact on Kumail Nanjiani.
In a new episode of the podcast, Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, the actor opened up about how his mental health suffered after the movie was panned by critics.
“I had the best time doing that movie, and I realized this is how work should feel like,” Nanjiani told the host. “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.”
“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 continued.
“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 45-year-old said that the bad reviews eventually led him to therapy.
“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," he explained. "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 shit has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
Eternals arrived in 2021 and boasted an A-list cast featuring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Kit Harington, and more.
It opened with $71 million at the domestic box office, and while that was a solid start during the COVID-19 pandemic, as far as Marvel movies go, the Chloe Zhao-directed film was by all accounts a miss. Eternals saw the lowest domestic debut in the MCU since 2015’s Ant-Man, which grossed $57 during its domestic opening weekend.
