Kumail Nanjiani: Body Dysmorphia As A Brown Man

LOS ANGELES: Pakistani-American Comedian Kumail Nanjiani has gone through intense growth, going from a small-time gaming podcast to starring in a Marvel Cinematic ‘The Eternals’. But Nanjiani admits that all the talk around his recent body transformation has led him to experience Body Dysmorphia, a mental health disorder that makes a person obsessively criticize their own body.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a mental health concern in which someone obsesses over one or more perceived flaws in their appearance that are usually seen as minor or unnoticeable. People suffering from BDD can feel so embarrassed and insecure about those inadequacies that, as a result, they may even avoid social gatherings and events.

Nanjiani opened up about his own BDD experience in an interview with Vulture and stated how he started working out as soon as Chloe Zhao, the director of The Eternals, cast him in the movie as Kingo, an ancient defender of Earth.

The actor said Zhao had given him the freedom to choose how he wanted to be portrayed in the movie, and he went straight to his trainer, wanting to look like the Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan. And he achieved it; soon, his transformation pictures were all over social media, with a lot of praise but even more backlash.

Besides the demeaning memes and jokes, Kumail became the subject of entire conspiracy theories on whether he took too much protein powder, abused steroids, or had experimental plastic surgery done. The internet was ruthless.

“How I look has been way too important to me. So when I heard some people reaffirming my own horrible, demeaning thoughts about myself? It was tough.” Nanjiani told Vulture.

It came to the point where he would wear baggy, unflattering clothing to the gym because of the insecurity, the Big Sick actor lamented. He had even started seeing a therapist for the first time because the praise was proving toxic as well.

Even though the actor had the ideal superhero body now, this made him feel more vulnerable, he told the magazine, sharing he had stated in a previous interview with GQ magazine that talking about his body makes him highly uncomfortable.

Every time he saw his reflection, the BDD would take root deep in his body, Nanjiani claims. The actor shared that people would compare him to a chicken when he was young and how growing up, his ideal body was Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bodybuilding days.

Nanjiani’s wife, Emily Gordon, believes that he faced more backlash than other actors who underwent similar transformations. She thinks it maybe because his fans felt betrayed. He was a nerd who looked like every other brown man, relatable, but now he’s an action hero.

But Nanjiani has been working on not letting all this affect him. He claims that his physical transformation had an ulterior motive; he wanted to appear as the antithesis to all the stereotypes attached to brown people. As a kid, superheroes and comics were his passion, so when he got the opportunity to be Kingo? He wanted to look like a superhero and he would do it all again, Kumail concluded.