Kumail Nanjiani reflects on how Eternals changed his relationship with food
Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani dramatically transformed his body to play the Marvel superhero Kingo in Eternals
Back in the comparatively free and innocent days of December 2019, Kumail Nanjiani shocked fans with the reveal that he had gotten astonishingly jacked for his role in Marvel’s Eternals. Then known for his role on Silicon Valley, the actor and comedian had clearly entered a new era.
“It felt, for a brief moment, powerful,” Nanjiani says in a new interview with NPR, via IndieWire. “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. It felt really exciting. 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. It made it so that I can walk down the street and someone will just come up to me and say something about my body.”
Nanjiani previously noted that no one from Marvel asked him to go through this transformation and that he was inspired to do so by his childhood admiration of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The process ultimately led the The Big Sick star to confront his “weird relationship with food” based on “guilt or regret.” Nanjiani had more to unpack when preparing for his latest role in Welcome To Chippendales, in which he plays a strip club owner whose relationship with body image contrasts with that of his employees.
“I realized that I had been so rigid with food and used it in so many unhealthy ways and then forcing myself to eat unhealthy amounts of unhealthy food in a way got me out of that trap,” he continues. “It’s still work to do, but it was freeing for months to just eat whatever I wanted, to eat as much as I wanted. It sort of freed me from some of the ways that I’ve been thinking about food.”
Some Marvel viewers have come to expect a particular look from these superpowered characters that is, well, not always possible for human actors to fulfill. This summer, Ted Lasso star Brett Goldstein faced judgment over his brief cameo in Thor: Love And Thunder, and even more recently, onetime Marvel Comics artist Mike Deodato Jr. criticized Tenoch Huerta’s appearance in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Welcome To Chippendales is now streaming weekly on Hulu. Nanjiani is also a producer on the Apple TV+ series Little America, which launches its second season tomorrow.