“The Big Sick” features Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan.
A lifelong stand-up comedy fan, Emily Gordon doesn’t approve of heckling. But at a Chicago nightclub in 2006, the then-therapist broke her own rule and heckled comic Kumail Nanjiani.
“He was doing pretty well, but then he asked if anybody in the audience was from Pakistan, and I thought it would be really funny if I, a girl who’s clearly not from Pakistan, was to shout something,” Gordon says. “So, I said, ‘Woohoo!’ and he kind of called me out for it, and was very funny.”
That is a moment of truth depicted in “The Big Sick,” the romantic dramedy, written by Nanjiani and Gordon, produced by Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up,” “Trainwreck”), and starring Nanjiani as himself and Zoe Kazan as Emily. The tale is based on a calamity that befell Gordon in 2007, when she was put in a medically induced coma for 12 days while doctors tried to diagnose a harrowing mystery illness that threatened to kill her. This fictional version of what happened pulls in both sets of parents — Kumail’s expect him to marry a Pakistani girl and Emily’s are initially leery of Kumail when they meet him in the hospital — as well as the Chicago stand-up scene.
“For me, it was interesting, because some of the dialogue from the movie is directly from my parents,” Nanjiani says. “My mom was on set once watching us shoot and she started laughing. And I said, ‘Why are you laughing?’ She said, ‘I said that to you!’ ”
Outside of Chicago stand-up fans, Nanjiani was an unknown when the events depicted in “The Big Sick” happened. Since then, his career has skyrocketed and today he is probably best known as the sarcastic programmer Dinesh on the HBO series “Silicon Valley.” He describes the show as “always fun and new and exciting,” but after four seasons, he never worries about how it will be received. His first starring role in a movie, one that he and his wife wrote, is a big unknown.
“This movie is such an expression of me and Emily, it’s so personal, that if people don’t like it, it’s like they’re rejecting our very existence,” Nanjiani says.
When Nanjiani and Gordon were working on their script for three years, and when the film was being shot in 2016, they couldn’t have anticipated how politically relevant a story about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant boy and an American girl would be. Nanjiani touched on politics in his recent commencement address at Iowa’s Grinnell College, his alma mater, but he’s grateful that politics were left out of “The Big Sick.”
“Judd said recently, ‘It’s good that we made this movie not knowing that it was going to come out at such a politically charged time, because then we would have tried to make a statement,’ ” Nanjiani says. “And really we just made a movie that tells our story and it’s a love story and the statement is incidental to that. … Now, portraying Muslims as a loving family feels like a big political statement.”
“The Big Sick” came about after Nanjiani met Apatow in 2012 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Apatow asked him to pitch some ideas, and the story of Emily’s illness was among them. Gordon’s reaction to the idea of a film about their lives was mixed, but she eventually overcame her res-
ervations enough to co-write the screenplay. In the months since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, she has begun to see the opportunity to make the movie as a gift.
“You know, some people have the same diagnosis that I do, people told me about relationships that they’d been in that had been similar,” says Gordon, about the illness that turned out to be adult-onset Still's disease, a rare type of arthritis that is a threat to major organs if undiagnosed and untreated. “And that is something I didn’t even anticipate, (that) this could connect with people that are in a very similar situation.”
“I had gotten used to the idea of being vulnerable in front of people or exposing parts of myself to people,” adds Nanjiani. “There is a joy, I think, in expressing yourself in such a vulnerable and naked way, but it’s also a little embarrassing. You feel like people sort of know you off of this.”
When working on the script, Nanjiani and Gordon couldn’t have anticipated how politically relevant a story about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant boy and an American girl would be.