COMIC GETS A CRASH COURSE IN ACTION IN A ROMCOM
▶ Funnyman Kumail Nanjiani tells Chris Newbould how ‘The Lovebirds’ prepared him for Marvel
To fans, the coming Marvel ensemble piece The Eternals represents a thrilling opportunity to take the much-loved superhero universe into the next chapter, following the events of 2019’s box-office smash Avengers: Endgame.
But to Kumail Nanjiani, however, who lines up alongside Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek in the forthcoming comic book yarn to play the Bollywood-loving, cosmic-powered alien Kingo, it is simply “another movie that I finished a couple of months ago”.
The unassuming American-Pakistani comedian does admit, however, that his new Marvel persona required him to partake in more action scenes than we might expect from the star of popular comedies such as Silicon Valley and The Big Sick.
“I had to be good enough at fighting, to be someone who could actually do it,” he tells
The National over a video call from the Los Angeles home he shares with his wife, comedy writer and producer Emily Gordon, where they are staying safe amid the pandemic.
With The Eternals now in post-production before its release next year, and the usual Disney veil of secrecy surrounding it, Nanjiani is not giving much more away. Instead, he focuses on promoting his latest film, The
Lovebirds, which launched on Netflix over the weekend.
At first glance, the low-budget romcom-meets-murder mystery could not be further removed from the all-gunsblazing, mega-budget world of the Marvel Universe.
Surprisingly, Nanjiani says the film – which finds this geeky documentary-maker Jibran caught up in a world of murder and mysterious cults, while simultaneously trying to salvage his relationship with his girlfriend (played by YouTube star Issa Rae) over the course of a very strange night in New Orleans – was the perfect preparation for moving into the comic book world.
“I realised that action acting is in some ways the exact opposite of scene work. I learnt a lot,” he says. “The whole point of acting, at least for me, is ‘I don’t want to think about what I’m going to say, I’m listening to her and reacting, being in the moment’.
“Whereas fight choreography is more like math. You are thinking: ‘I’m going to do this, then he’s going to do that and it’s my turn to do this.’ It’s like the opposite of acting, and understanding that took me a little while.”
The Lovebirds may have offered Nanjiani a useful crash course in shooting action scenes, but the movie could be held up by future film historians as a textbook case study of the effects of the coronavirus crisis on the industry.
First, the film’s scheduled premiere at SXSW in March was cancelled as the Texan festival became the first bigname movie event to fall victim to the pandemic. Next, its planned April cinema release was scrapped by the closure of theatres. Now, with distribution rights to the film having switched from Paramount to Netflix, it this weekend launched straight on to the platform and streamed directly into the living rooms of millions of viewers staying safe and at home.
Nanjiani seems happy enough with the film’s new home, and given the soaring audience figures for the major streaming platforms during the near-global lockdown he could hardly have asked for a better time to redirect a cinema launch to video-on-demand.
Still, the comic says he misses the human interaction that would normally go with releasing a new movie.
“[The promotion] has been all like this – me in this room, you in that room. It’s pretty strange,” he says.
“It would have been really fun, because we had a big promotional tour planned. We had the premiere at SXSW, then we were supposed to go all over the country showing the movie and doing question-and-answer sessions. That would have been really, really fun. The promotion is very, very different now.”
We can only hope that by the time of The Eternals’s scheduled February 2021 release, the cinemas are open and Nanjiani is back among audiences and fans promoting his debut in a cape.
Until then, he is staying home and using his laptop as his primary means of communication with the outside world, and faces the same frustrations as the rest of us as we navigate our “new normal”.
In case you are left feeling inadequate by social media accounts of your friends and peers mastering baking, learning a new language or writing a novel during lockdown, take solace from the fact that even Marvel superheroes can struggle to find motivation.
“I have definitely not learnt anything new. I don’t even want to take on something new,” Nanjiani says. “I’m just going to stay in my zone and do the stuff I know how to do. Once the quarantine is over then I’ll challenge myself. Right now is not the time to do that, for me.”
The Lovebirds is streaming on Netflix