"Marvel" star Kumail Nanjiani shared that he had to get counseling to deal with negative reviews of his film, "Eternals."
During a recent episode of the "Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum" podcast, the Pakistani-American actor claimed he became "too aware" of the bad reviews that critics gave Marvel’s "The Eternals" to the point where he needed professional help.
The 2021 film, which starred Nanjiani alongside actors Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and "Game of Thrones" star Kit Harrington as superheroes who protect Earth from evil forces, currently has a "rotten" 47% score on review aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com.
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The low scores make the film one of the poorest reviewed movies in Marvel’s cinematic universe, far below the acclaim of the studio’s "The Avengers" and "Avengers: Endgame."
Nanjiani admitted to the podcast host that he "was reading every review and checking too much," when the film came out, seeing poor scores when he expected them to be good.
"It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well-reviewed," he said, adding, "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 "Silicon Valley" actor insisted the film was judged too harshly, telling the host, "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 then revealed he got counseling to deal with that kind of public reaction. "It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to Emily [his wife], and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some s--- has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that."
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Nanjiani also noted his wife believes he still has "trauma from" the critical reception. The actor said that he and his coworkers still talk about how rough the reviews were, saying, "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."
Nanjiani has also spoken about other pressures relating to his role in the film, particularly body image issues he dealt with after getting into shape for it.
In an interview with NPR in 2022, Nanjiani mentioned that getting into superhero shape ultimately had a "negative" effect on him. He told the outlet at the time that having his new ripped physique "felt, for a brief moment, powerful. And then after that, it was by and large negative."
"In the beginning, having that reaction from people — I’d never had that reaction before, and I think part of me had always wanted it — it felt powerful," he said, adding, "And then pretty quickly after that, it felt reductive, it felt naked, it felt vulnerable. And it made it so that the discussion of my body exists in the public sphere."
