Marvel's Eternals Star Reflects on "Trauma" From Movie's Poor Reception
Kumail Nanjiani says he's had to go to therapy because of the reception to Eternals.
Years after its release, Eternals is still one of the worst-reviewed movies released by Marvel Studios. According to Rotten Tomatoes, only 47-percent of critics filed a favorable review of the picture, making it the second lowest score on the review aggregator, ahead only of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. According to Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani, the poor reviews led to him entering counseling to help get him over the trauma related to the film's poor reception.
"I knew it wasn't me. I think that there were a lot of things that went into it. I love that movie and I'm very proud of that movie. I've seen that movie a bunch of times because it's my kind of movie, and a lot of my stuff I don't watch. 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 said on the latest episode of Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum.
Nanjiani then added that the cast of the film started reading the film's earliest reveals while on a globe-trotting promotional tour for the film.
"The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it. I was reading every review and checking too much. I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not many much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie," he added. "It was really hard and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to Emily and I can't approach my work this way anymore. Some shit's gotta change, so I started counseling and I still talk to my therapist about that."
That's when he said he recently grabbed dinner with one of his Eternals co-stars and was convinced to attend therapy to talk about the events.
"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," the actor concluded. "This guy, that I'm talking about, is truly one of the best actors of our generation and has been nominated for Oscars since then, so I realized I can't be so results-based in my work anymore because I can't control."
Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.