Actor Kumail Nanjiani said that the terrible reviews of the Marvel film “Eternals” in 2021 affected his mental health so much that he went to therapy for it.
“The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it,” the 45-year-old said during a recent appearance on the podcast “Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “I was reading every review and checking 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,” Nanjiani explained.
Their plan backfired, however, and led to the actors promoting the film as many reviewers heaped criticism on it.
“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,” the actor said. “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 sh** has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
“Emily says that I do have trauma from it,” Nanjiani continued. “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.”
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“Eternals” is a superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics race of humanoids. It was directed and co-written by Chloé Zhao and features an ensemble cast of big-name stars, including Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, and others. The movie grossed $402 million worldwide and received some awards and nominations, but it was also plagued by bad reviews and mostly panned by critics as not meeting expectations.
The Marvel film currently has a 47% critic score and 77% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Clearly, we’re supposed to leave the cinema filled with an urgent sense of anticipation. But all I felt was relief that the two-and-a-half hour running time had finally come to an end,” the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer said.