Kumail Nanjiani Entered Therapy After “Reading Every Review” Following The Release Of ‘Eternals’: “I Still Talk To My Therapist About It”

Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani entered therapy following the brutal reception of the film.

The actor and comic opened up about how he dealt with Eternals bashing on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, where despite noting that he “loved” the film and is “proud of everyone’s work” on it, the fallout was “really, really hard” after Marvel’s high expectations, per Variety.

“Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, so they lifted the embargo really early, and they also put it in some fancy movie festivals,” he recalled. “And they sent us on a big global tour promoting the movie right as the embargo was lifted.”

Unfortunately, the reviews were just the opposite of what Marvel had anticipated. Despite acknowledging “the sincerity of the performances” of the star-studded cast, The New York Times called the film “a titanic struggle,” while The Guardian described it as “everlasting comic book mediocrity” in its review headline.

The film opened to a little less than $71.3 million at the box office during its opening weekend, per IMDb, less than half of its $200 million budget.

Nanjiani confessed that he was “too aware” of the “really bad” reviews.

“I was reading every review,” he admitted. “I was checking too much because this thing had become too much in my head.”

Nanjiani noted that this all took place “right after the [COVID-19] pandemic” in 2021, and he and Rosenbaum emphasized how “everything [was] heightened” during that period.

“I think that there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much,” he claimed. “And I think not very much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie.”

He eventually realized that it was “unfair” to him and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, and that he couldn’t “approach [his] work this way anymore.”

“Some shit’s gotta change,” he continued. “So I very intentionally, I did start counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that. Emily says that I do have trauma from it.”

He said that he and his wife had gotten dinner with someone who had also worked on the film that seemed to share his feelings about it.

“We were like, ‘That was tough, wasn’t it?’” he remembered. “And he’s like ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”

Nonetheless, Nanjiani has since come to the conclusion that he “cannot be so results-based in [his] work anymore.”

Eternals is streaming on Disney+. Watch Nanjiani’s full interview above.