Kumail Nanjiani Can Do Anything

And so, for months, Nanjiani would leave his home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz and head to a discreetly located mega gym in Beverly Hills. During the hour-long trip, he would be filled with dread. Hed been hitting the gym since he was 16 years old but had never trained as intensely as he would for The Eternals; at one point, electric shocks were involved. The early workouts were so brutal hed come close to vomiting. All Nanjiani could do was try to dissociate from the pain. Leave your body, hed keep repeating. Pleasedo the movements, and leave your body.

It didnt work. For a while, the only joy in this daily routine came from the relief Nanjiani felt when he drove away, aching and exhausted and more than a little shell-shocked. At first, whenever he came home from a workout, he wasnt able to focus on anything, notes his wife, writer-producer Emily V. Gordon. He was still a functioning person, but for an hour, you couldnt really count on him to have a conversation. His body was adjusting.

Soon Nanjiani realized that if he was going to complete his transformation , his mind would have to adjust as well. Thats the way its been throughout his life: In his 20s, he quit a full-time job to pursue a high-risk stand-up career. In his 30s, he decided to suddenly jump into acting and then somehow made that his second career. Hes always looked at whatever opportunity was in front of him and thought, Get good at this. Also: Hes obsessive, says Gordon. When Kumail gets into things, he gets really into things.

At the same time, he was getting in shape for The Eternals, which he finished shooting less than a week ago. For a while, Nanjiani had to keep the movie hush-hushhe couldnt explain why he was spending so many hours in the gym. One of the few to be clued in was Thomas Middleditch, his Silicon costar. Through the years, the two men have shared their fitness aspirations: Middleditch recalls a time when Nanjiani became fixated on the super-ripped Pakistani model Abbas Jafri. Kumail would show us pictures of him while we were on set, and hed look kind of envious, says Middleditch. Neither of us has a hesitation about going, I wish I had his jawline or arms or whatever. I think a lot of sensitive weirdo comedians secretly aspire to be the tough guy. And when they finally get a reason to totally change their bodylike becoming a superherotheyre more incentivized.

Middleditch, whos known Nanjiani for more than a decade, wasnt surprised by his friends commitment to his Eternals routine: When Kumails given a shot at something, hes going to take it. Nanjianis showbiz trajectory bears that out. His path has been genuinely wild, the result of ceaseless curiosity and hardcore hustle.

Nanjiani arrived in the U.S. as a teenager to attend Grinnell College in Iowa, a school he knew little about, in a country hed never before visited. (Some of his Western pop-culture knowledge came from old Mad magazines hed found in a Karachi bazaar.) I was scared, and I didnt want to do it, he says. But I had no other options, no plan. My first two weeks there were among the worst in my life.

Soon, though, he began making friendssome of whom would be in the audience several years later, watching Nanjiani onstage at a local coffee shop for his first-ever stand-up gig. Hed spent his college years becoming enthralled by comedy, recording and rewatching stand-up specials before writing his first jokes. And although he has no recollection of what he talked about for nearly half an hour that day, it remains one of the best sets in my life, Nanjiani says. It was magical.

He then relocated to Chicago, where he worked full-time at charter schools, helping kids with their computers, while pursuing stand-up at night. Those early gigs werent always great, and for the first five years, he wasnt sure if hed be able to make a living out of comedy. But he never thought about giving up. Even after a bad gig, he says, I wasnt like, Oh, Ill quit. I was like, Now I know what that feels like.

YIPPEE-KI-YAY- For Nanjiani, 1988s Die Hard is the gold-standard blockbuster. "Its a perfect movie filled with all these little moments. In the directors commentary, they talk a lot about how a movie should have joyand I want a movie that has joy in it." Get Kumails Look: <a href="https://www.hanes.com/shop/hanes/hanes-ultimate--153%3B-mens-comfortsoft-reg%3B-tank-undershirt-3-pack-7990w3?categoryId=59079" target="_blank">Hanes tank </a> BusinessInsider USA Images

By 2007, he felt secure enough in his stand-up to quit everything and head to New York to focus on comedy. Nanjianis material mixed stories from his personal life with riffs on Star Trek and movies like The Thing. He had all these little observations about popular culture, and what he found funny about them wasnt the most obvious thing, notes Michael Showalter, who first spotted Nanjiani around that time and went on to direct him in The Lovebirds and 2017s The Big Sick, the Oscar-nominated rom-com-dram Nanjiani and Gordon wrote about their relationship. While a lot of comedians can be very aggressive, Kumails comedy was silly and whimsical.

Showalter hired Nanjiani as a writer for his 2009 series, Michael & Michael Have Issues, and even offered him a role as a fictitious version of himself. Nanjiani was in his early 30s, and although hed had cameos on The Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live, hed never seriously considered acting before. Id always thought the writers do the real work and the actors are just saying the words, he says. I was very confident in my stand-up, but I didnt feel confident acting. I was like, This is very difficult, and I want to learn more.

Nanjiani in The Big Sick. BusinessInsider USA Images

Michael & Michael was canceled after just seven episodes, devastating Nanjiani, whod been convinced he was going to spend the next several years on the show. In order to get away from the scene of the crime, he jokes, he decided to move to Los Angeles. Once there, Nanjiani treated his semi-accidental acting career with his usual seriousnessGet good at thisand began taking acting classes. It was like therapy, he says. Id trained myself to not feel emotions, to push them away, because emotions are scary. And as soon as I started taking acting classes, I started crying at movies and commercials more. All these emotions Id learned to suppress, I was now learning to get in touch with. It made my life better, made my anxiety better.

Nanjiani in HBOs Silicon Valley. BusinessInsider USA Images

The classes also made him a more at-ease performer, and Nanjiani slowly accrued a series of breakout TV roles. He was the virtual unknown who was sorta everywhere: There he was as a grating cell-phone salesman on Portlandia, or a too-eager numbers nerd on Veep, or a legally savvy agoraphobe on 31 (!) episodes of Franklin & Bash. By the time Silicon Valley debuted in 2014, hed made a name playing gently nerdy (and not-so-gently needling) young men. Nanjiani was Hollywoods go-to cerebral smart ass, at a time when that type was in high demand. A few years ago, Nanjiani says, I was working with a great guyI wont say who, but hes a very handsome, really in-shape guywho was making fun of me for being doughy. And I was like, I could weigh another 50 pounds and Ill still work. But if you gain ten pounds, youll never work another day in your life.

HALFWAY THROUGH our lunch, an old writer friend of Nanjianis strolls by, flashes a knowing smile, and says, Its been a while. Do anything...noteworthy lately? Nanjianis Eternals stint may have begun in secrecy, but by last spring, word had gotten out that hed gone Marvel. He first met with producers about the role in late 2018, though that wasnt his first attempt at breaking into the superhero world: Years before Silicon Valley, hed auditioned for a role on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and was crushed when he didnt get it.

But later, when he saw comedy performers like Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd being converted into superheroes, he started entertaining the idea, however far-off, that he could become part of the Marvel universe as well. It was a pipe dream, says Nanjiani. But I was very strategic about it. He turned down supporting parts in other comic-book projects, worried theyd take him out of the running for his own big role. And he made it clear that he didnt want to play some tech-loving sidekick. I was like, I dont want to be just part of a Marvel movie; I want to be a Marvel superhero.

Nanjiani at San Diego Comic Con International for The Eternals BusinessInsider USA Images

Finally, in the same year he got an Oscar nod for his Big Sick script, he joined The Eternals. The movie, which also stars Angelina Jolie and Kit Harington , follows a group of centuries-old immortals who secretly live on Earth, with Nanjiani as Kingo, an arrogant, cosmic-powered being who lives in the present day as a buff Bollywood star. Its not a character he knew too well; as a young comic fan, he relied on whatever random titles and one-off issues he could get his hands on, and The Eternals was hardly a mainstream must-read.

But he knew exactly how he wanted to play Kingo: the same way Bruce Willis played the wry, weary, machine-gun-toting hero of 1988s Die Hard, one of Nanjianis favorite films. That movies life-or-death, and Eternals is life-or-death, too, he says. I was like, How can a character crack wise but still have tension, and not make it feel like youre making fun of the whole thing?

Williss Die Hard turn has a historical connection as well. As Middleditch notes, its not unusual for a comedy star to get ripped nowadays. It happens here and there, where they become a hot-bod boy: the Kevin Harts, the Joe Rogans, and, I guess, the Carrot Tops. But Willis was among the first to make that transition seem credible, having turned from a smirky prime-time rom-com actor on Moonlighting into a shirtless action-movie dynamo without losing his light touch. (He kept the smirk intact.) Theres a throughline that runs from Williss yippee-ki-yay makeover to Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder to Nanjiani in The Eternals.

PSYCHO EXERCISER- To et into shape like American Psychos Patrick Bateman, Nanjiani says, "I tried all the different diets: paleo, keto, fasting. Id go for a couple weeks, hit a plateau, and then switch. Now I take all of the lessons Ive learned from all of them combined." Get Kumails Look: Polo Ralph Lauren boxers; Adidas Originals sneakers BusinessInsider USA Images

Nanjiani had his own ideas for just how buff Kingo should look. I wanted Kumail to have the freedom to interpret his character, especially his physicality, says The Eternals director Chlo Zhao. So he looked to Bollywood stars he admired, like Indian box-office eternal Hrithik Roshan, whos played the superhero Krrish in a series of smash films. I went to my trainer and said, I want to look like this guy, says Nanjiani.

To achieve it, hed have to lean heavily on Marvel for help. When The Eternals began filming, he met with a studio chef, who grilled him on his food preferences; soon Nanjiani was being delivered five meals a day, including on weekends, all of it carefully planned out. They were like, If youre going to have a can of Coke today, let us know in the morning so we can adjust and account for it, he says. Nanjiani usually had the same breakfaststeak and eggs, or eggs and chickenbut for six months, he never repeated the other meals. And while he was encouraged to eat what he wanted on weekends, he had so successfully cut out such hazards as added sugar and gluten that when he went crazy one night with some sticky toffee pudding, he felt it the next day. Just 12 hours of physical pain, he says.

Inside Kumail Nanjiani's Muscle Transformation BusinessInsider USA Images

That was nothing compared with the anguish of his workouts. Hed exercise during lunch breaks on Silicon Valley; on weekends in a London gym; and on the Eternals set, with its 24-hour-a-day on-call trainers. But it was in those early months last year, in that Beverly Hills compound, that Nanjiani did the most training, physically and emotionally. Hed gone from being a dutiful gym rat to having electric shocks administered to his biceps in order to build more muscle. I realized, if this is what working out is, Ive never really worked out a moment in my life, he says.

It was around that time that Nanjiani decided the only way hed make it through the trainingthe only way he could get good at thiswould be if he embraced just how awful the workouts were making him feel. If he opted to simply leave his body, he wouldnt get anywhere. I had to change my relationship to pain, he says. Youre so designed to avoid it, but in that situation you really have to be okay with it. You have to want it. Its almost trying to rewire your brain.

For a while, he wasnt sure how he wanted to announce the results of all that rewiring and reshaping to the world. But last December, figuring he was in the best shape hed ever be in, he posted a pair of photos of himself, bare-torsoed and sharp-abbed, to Instagram. The thirsty shirtless, as he called them, promptly ate up Facebook and Twitter, and later anchored a segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Nanjianis newly ripped torso even wound up on Pornhub, as the thumbnail image for the sites Muscular Men category.

Half the messages I got that day were from people being like, Hey, I want to have sex with your husband, says Gordon, and the other half were from people making sure I was okay with my husbands naked body being everywhere. She compares the experience to that of The Big Sick: It took a very private thing from our lives and made it incredibly public. And all I could be was really proud, because he looks amazing.

Nanjiani didnt quite feel the same wayat least not before he shared his new physique with the masses. I dont want to discount people who genuinely have debilitating body issues, he says. I dont have that. But I did start getting some body dysmorphia. Id look in the mirror and Id see my absand when I looked again, they would fade. I would just see the flaws. The Instagram photos helped. When I saw that reaction was when I was like, Okay, I clearly dont see whats actually there. Its something that Im trying to be aware of and be better at, because thats not a good way to be. You want to be easy on yourself.

Thats where Nanjiani is at the moment: trying to be a little easier on himself while figuring out his non-superhero identity in the immediate future. This is a key time to establish how its going to be going forward, he says of his post-Eternals lifestyle. Because it could very easily go back to how things were. And I cant do that.

But while he enjoys his workouts in earnest now, Nanjiani would still rather spend his time rewatching old Harrison Ford movies, or playing video games, or just going for a walk around the neighborhood with Gordon. The goal is to get energy from the gym so I can go do other stuff, he says. People ask me, Do you think youre more intimidating now? And Im like, Not at all. These muscles are useless. Theyre decorative.