Kumail Nanjiani has revealed that he had to seek mental health support after the negative reviews of 2021 superhero movie Eternals.
Although the early reviews of the film were generally positive, it was reported in November 2021 as the lowest scoring Marvel film on reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Its current score on the site is 47 per cent.
From Nomadland director, Chloé Zhao, and featuring a star-studded cast including Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kit Harrington, Barry Keoghan and Angelina Jolie, it made $402million in the box office against a $236million budget.
Speaking on the Inside Of You With Michael Rosenbaum podcast, Nanjiani said: “The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it.” He shared that he was “reading every review and reading too much.”
“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,” he continued.
He shared that he had to seek therapy in the wake of the movie’s poor performance. “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 counselling. I still talk to my therapist about that,” said The Boys star.
“Emily says that I do have trauma from it,” he added. “We actually just got dinner with somebody else from that movie and we were like, ‘That was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”
Elsewhere, Keoghan opened up last month about the “insane” audition he had with Steven Spielberg.
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