Page 83 - SHARP Winter 2022

This was an epic battle, waged across eons, between different races of genetically souped-up humanoids.
Like the comics circa the 1970s, the contemporary Marvel Cinematic Universe is digging deep into its fictional lore. If the MCU brass learned anything way back with Iron Man, it’s that even relatively untested heroes can still make a massive impact. To wit: Marvel’s recent film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a modern martial arts epic starring Canadian Simu Liu in the title role, proved a sizable hit despite the character’s broader status as a relative unknown.
Nanjiani also cites 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, another blockbuster based on a more obscure Marvel Comics imprint, as a prime example. By this point, for a certain (large) audience, the MCU brand is the draw, even more than any given character. As Nanjiani says, “I hope people know enough of the MCU and trust it enough that they’ll go out and see a bunch of superheroes that they haven’t heard of before.”
Among the new team’s mostly unheard-of heroes is Nanjiani’s Kingo. In the comics, the character takes the form of a Japanese warrior, active in the feudal era. He defended against the Mongol invasion and mastered the ways of the samurai warrior. In the modern age, he wields his skills on the silver screen as a char- ismatic Japanese film star. The movie changes things up a bit. Nanjiani’s Kingo has been living in India. And he thrives not by making sword-and-sandal epics but by hiding in plain sight as a major Bollywood film star.
“I’ve seen a lot of superheroes where their superpower weighs heavily on them,” Nanjiani says. “This guy’s different. He loves being a superhero. He loves having these powers. He loves using these powers. He loves fighting...A lot of superheroes are pressed into duty because of the way the world is, or the powers they have, or the responsibility they feel. Kingo loves being a movie star. He loves being rich. He loves being successful. And he loves shooting lasers out of his fingers.”
The revised characterization was an opportunity for Nanjiani to tap into his own background — though the actor is quick to clarify that Kingo himself is actually not Indian or Pakistani, but rather an extraterrestrial superhuman posing as a South Asian humanoid. Still, it was a chance to indulge his own childhood obsession with Indian cinema.
“I grew up watching Bollywood,” Nanjiani recalls. “I know that world really, really, really well. Basically, up until the ‘90s, I know almost every Bollywood movie ever made. Those people who are big
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in Bollywood are basically kings. I don’t want to think gods — be- cause nobody’s a god — but they have this mythic power that they carry with them.” To prepare for the role, Nanjiani watched films and interviews with major Bollywood stars, like the Hindi-language superstar Shah Rukh Khan, whose global box-office take marks him as one of the biggest movie stars currently working. Nanjiani also wanted to communicate the full breadth and beauty of Bollywood to Western audiences watching The Eternals. And that’s where the dancing comes in.
As Nanjiani sees it, if Hollywood audiences know anything about Bollywood, they probably know, first and foremost, that it’s a major film production centre, and second, that the movies themselves feature a lot of lavish dance numbers. “Our duty then becomes,” he explains, “to portray the thing that people know in a way that is very, very authentic, and in the way that most Americans don’t know.” He didn’t want to embrace the irony, or perception of arch, cartoonish melodrama. He didn’t want to do a Bollywood dance sequence in a way that was, as he puts it, “winky-winky.”
So the production hired 50 dancers, all of South Asian origin, who were familiar with the form. And they mounted a big-ticket Bollywood dance sequence. It was another rare opportunity: not only to explore the far-off reaches of the Marvel Comics back catalogue but to acquaint modern blockbuster audiences with cinematic styles they may only be aware of in broadly caricatured or stereotyped form. “Let’s portray the joy, the excitement, the passion,” he says. “This should be like a badass, awesome secret. We want this to really feel like an actual Bollywood movie set. So it was tremendously important that we get that stuff right.”
It’s stories like this that may help ease any lingering worries that Nanjiani has absconded from the dingy basements and Games Workshop backrooms of comic book culture to mix in the gym lockers and frat houses with the beefy, square-jawed jocks. Even when he’s shredding himself into the best shape of his life to play an ancient, genetically altered guardian of the galaxy who can blast laser beams from the tips of his fingers, he still manages to mount a rococo, Bollywood-inspired dance sequence. More than a turncoat in the pop culture wars, he may well manage to ease tensions between the betas and the alphas — an ancient enmity that, like the battles between Marvel’s various races of superhu- mans, is seemingly eternal.
For all the hype around his new movie (and his new body), Kumail Nanjiani is still the same guy. He remains — proudly, and even a bit defiantly — an indoor kid.
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