OUR AMAZING LOVE STORY
He wasn’t ready to commit—then she fell into a coma. How a real-life tale became romcom hit
The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon tell how their real-life tale became a romcom hit.
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s first meeting was right out of a romcom script: he was doing a stand-up set in Chicago in 2006 when she yelled “Woohoo!” from the audience. He thought she was heckling him. To this day she insists she was being supportive: “I’m Southern! I ‘woohoo’ at things.” Sparks flew and Nanjiani, a comedian who moved to the US from Pakistan as a teen and now stars on Silicon Valley, and Gordon, a therapist turned comedy writer from North Carolina, started dating. Eight months into their relationship, Gordon was thinking about their future together—while Nanjiani “really wasn’t,” he concedes. “We were having such a great time,” he says. “I really, really liked her. But my parents didn’t know about her and there was no plan.”
That’s when fate took a terrifying turn. Gordon started feeling feverish and had trouble breathing, then her health nosedived once she got to hospital, as her organs seemed to be shutting down. Unable to figure out the cause, doctors put Gordon into a medically induced coma. “They made me sign the paperwork,” recalls Nanjiani, 39. “That was my first clue that this wasn’t just the flu.” Over eight days in the intensive-care unit by Gordon’s side before she woke up, the commitmentphobe had an epiphany: “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I love this woman and I want to spend the rest of my life with her,’ ” he says. “‘If she comes out of this, I’m going to marry her.’ ”
Gordon, 38, spent a month in the hospital recovering from what was eventually diagnosed as adult-onset Still’s Disease (AOSD), a rare inflammatory immune disorder that can have life-threatening complications—and the two wed three months after that. Now, a decade into their marriage, they are earning some of the best movie reviews of the year for The Big Sick, a fictionalised version of their love story that the couple co-wrote. Nanjiani stars as himself and Zoe Kazan plays Gordon.
For the movie, they added some fictional elements of family strife—in reality, Nanjiani’s traditionally minded Muslim parents, who had been trying in vain to interest him in an arranged marriage, didn’t meet Gordon until after the couple’s civil wedding at Chicago’s City Hall. His parents nevertheless welcomed her and threw them a Pakistani ceremony. “It was lovely,” says Gordon. Both of their families “were like, ‘Hey, this crazy thing happened. Let’s just kind of lean into it.’ ”
These days, she manages her AOSD flare-ups with medication and rest, and the couple finish each other’s sentences as they cuddle with their cat Bagel in their eclectic house in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. Marriage, says Nanjiani, “is like having a great slumber party all the time. We just love hanging out.”