Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
Pakistani-American actor Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon are receiving upbeat review for their romantic comedy “The Big Sick,” which sthey co-wrote and infused with biographical accounts of their own friendship and marriage.
Nanjiani, who came to the U.S. to study, has emerged as a prominent comedian in recent years, and also stars in the The Big Sick film, which gained a lot of attention upon release on Friday.
During an interview with National Public Radio, Nanjiani shared how it all started with a woo-hoo from a pretty girl, while he asked during a performance if there was anyone in the audience form Pakistan.
Nanjiani and Gordon developed a close friendship. During the interview, Nanjiani, who was born in Karachi, also reflects on the difference in the way families approach marriage in the American and Pakistani societies. In American it is the rebel kind of kid, the concept of American Dream and the individuality, while in Pakistan it is the community that takes precedence.
Here are some excerpts from the interview with NPR aired this week:
“GROSS: Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, welcome to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on the film. So, Emily, my first question is to you. Did you really woo-hoo Kumail when he was at the mic?
EMILY V. GORDON: That is actually one part of the film that is entirely, 100 percent accurate. We took some creative license, of course, but that is exactly how Kumail and I met. I did woo-hoo him, I say, helpfully, at his show. I was not a heckler before, have not been a heckler since. But that is how we met.
GROSS: Did you consider it a heckle or did you consider it a way to be flirtatious?
GORDON: I was kind of being funny and flirtatious. He asked a question. There was silence. I thought it would be funny to kind of, you know, respond to the question, is anyone here from Pakistan? It was quite funny.
(LAUGHTER)
GORDON: And, you know, I was kind of being a little flirtatious. Sure, why not? But I don’t recommend heckling. I don’t think it’s a good idea overall.
GROSS: OK, we got that point (laughter).
GORDON: Yes.
GROSS: (Laughter) So Kumail, when Emily woo-hooed (ph) you, did you think it was flirtatious or annoying? Did you see it as a heckle or as helpful?
NANJIANI: It certainly wasn’t helpful. What I remember is her going woo-hoo, me looking at her and seeing this very, very pretty girl and being like, oh, she’s cute. And so I was charmed by it rather than being upset by it. I think it’s more the messenger than the message.
GROSS: So you both write comedy, but your life isn’t a comedy. So you’ve turned a difficult period of your life into comedy, the period when Emily was in a medically induced coma. So how did you go about trying to find the comedy there? You know, ’cause you still manage to keep it as a comedy even during the rough periods like that period of the film.
GORDON: I think part of what helps is that because we had been through it, anything that we wrote that was kind of added, you know, fictionalized parts or added new scenes, we knew the emotional truth of what happened. And we knew that we didn’t want to disrespect what actually happened and the seriousness of the kind of being in a medically induced coma.
So I think that helped us just as a mindset to go and not kind of writing anything that would have felt disrespectful or off-base or kind of off-color for the movie. That being said, that was something Judd was really great about encouraging us to do was…
GROSS: This is Judd Apatow, yeah.
GORDON: Judd Apatow, who helped us produce the movie, was that you write the movie out, kind of put everything out there. And he was like, don’t worry about the comedy, the comedy will come, which I think was really good advice.
NANJIANI: Yeah. And I would say, you know, generally, comedy is a person in trouble. It’s a person dealing with the situation that they’re ill-equipped to handle. And we knew that the real-life event, no matter how traumatic, was basically us, me and her parents, dealing with an event that we weren’t equipped to handle, which is the person we’re all in love with being very, very ill.
So we knew that the general construction of it could be comedic. We just had to figure out specifically how could we make it a comedy without losing the reality level of a very young woman being very ill.
GROSS: Emily, would you explain why you were in a medically induced coma?
GORDON: Yes, absolutely. I had been sick for a little while and people kept telling me I had the flu, I had pneumonia, I was having panic attacks. None of that kind of seemed right to me.
NANJIANI: But you weren’t having panic attacks. They thought you were.
GORDON: No, I certainly was not. That’s what I’m saying. They kept – every time I went in, they were diagnosing me with something different. And all I knew is that I just felt quite awful, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. So by the time I went to the doctor – and they decided to admit me to the hospital because my breathing was so unstable that they wanted to kind of check me out in a hospital.
And by the time I got there, my breathing was so unstable, as was my heart rate, that the only thing they could do to kind of keep me safe and kind of keep my vitals stabilized was to put me on a respirator. And you should not be on a respirator while you are conscious. So that was why they put me in a medically induced coma.
NANJIANI: Yeah, they had to take pressure off of Emily’s body. So they would put some of the vital functions on machines so that her body wasn’t taxed. I remember when I got to the hospital, Emily was in the ER. And I went in, and I was talking to her. And the nurse came in. And the nurse – first thing she said to – she was holding reports and she said to me – or to Emily she said, oh, you’re a very sick girl.
And I was like, what does that mean? She doesn’t really look that sick.
GROSS: Gosh, a respirator – it does its job, but it’s very terrifying to watch somebody on a respirator. It makes a lot of noise. It’s basically breathing for you. So you hear, you know, the inhale and the exhale that the respirator’s creating. And it seems like it’s a very invasive kind of machine. There’s – what? – a tube down your throat.
GORDON: All the way down your throat. It’s incredibly invasive. I, for many years, had a hard time even looking at anyone on television or in movies that had one in their mouths. It’s, like, even though you’re not conscious for it, some part of you must be because it’s quite traumatic for sure.
GROSS: Kumail, did you talk to her while she was in coma?
NANJIANI: Yeah. The nurse actually really encouraged us to talk to her because they said that she could hear. So we would talk to her pretty often, her parents and I. We would sort of keep her updated and just tell her what was happening in the news and what was happening with, like, celebrity gossip and stuff so…
GROSS: (Laughter).
GORDON: I really appreciated that.
NANJIANI: Yeah. We would talk to her all the time. I think I ran some jokes by her.
GORDON: Did not get a good response.
NANJIANI: Not a good response.
GROSS: (Laughter) And, Emily, so people were assuming, like, your parents, Kumail, were assuming that maybe you could hear them, even though you were in a coma. So they would talk to you so that you would know that they were there and be comforted by that. Did you know that they were there? Could you hear them? Do you have any memory of hearing them?
GORDON: I absolutely do. I think – and, you know, I think it’s partially because I was in a medically induced coma, so I don’t know what it’s like for other people. But I was very well aware that both Kumail and my parents were there in the room with me. I had no – I could kind of hear snatches of what they were saying.
I had constructed an elaborate backstory for my plight that involved Kumail being sick. I thought Kumail was in a hospital and that I was visiting him. So I clearly had some level of awareness of what was happening. But I…
NANJIANI: It was, like, this extended dream you were having.
GORDON: Yeah, which, to me, I thought it was only, like, a day or two long. I didn’t really have a sense of time so much. But I was – my brain was trying to make sense of things. So I could definitely hear them. Not the entire time, but I could hear them.
NANJIANI: Once she was out, we were talking about it a few weeks later. And she was talking about the doctor – actually, no, she was still in the hospital. But she’d been awake, and she was pretty lucid by this point. And she was telling about – she was like, where’s the doctor with the sticky candy hands? And that happened because, you know, she had all this tape on her and she was getting prodded with needles.
So even while she was in the coma, she could feel people sort of putting sticky tape on her. And so she, in her dream state, had this doctor who had, you know, sticky candy hands.”
