Kumail Nanjiani Finally Breaks His Silence
This was originally published at Uproxx on May 19th, 2020, but no longer exists on the internet. So here it is, again. The lead image has changed though. The image being used is now one from his recent comedy special, Night Thoughts. If you have not seen Night Thoughts, you should watch Night Thoughts on Hulu. (If you are someone who votes on Emmy awards, you should vote for Night Thoughts.)
If you remember May 19th, 2020, it was a pretty unhappy time in the world. (I get that it is again, but now for brand new reasons.) Kumail Nanjiani was promoting The Love Birds (spoiler, this interview has nothing to do with The Love Birds), a movie that was to be released in theaters by Paramount, but due to then current events, was sold to Netflix. Ideally, for the studio releasing a movie, the way a promotional press interview is supposed to go is the movie being released is discussed at length. But, what often happens is, after answering the same similar questions all day, the talent promoting the movie often gets bored and would just rather talk about literally anything else.
Before this interview started, Nanjiani and I kind of conspired to do something "fun" to break of the monotony of the day and, well, the horrors of the world at that time. So instead of doing an interview about The Love Birds, we just launch right into an interview about the 1982 film The Beastmaster, starring Marc Singer. And then we doubled down, switching the topic to the 1983 movie, Krull. To be fair, we thought we had cleared this with the powers that be because no one wants to get "in trouble" for an interview about The Beastmaster and, or Krull. As it turned out, the people we cleared this with were not there on the day of this interview. And, also as it turned out, the people in charge who were there that day did not find this "fun" at all.
We thought about doing this again when he was promoting the 2023 animated film, Migration. We even decided the "breaks his silence" movie would be Zardoz. We both realized, quickly, discussing a very strange, sex-filled movie instead of an animated film about birds, aimed at younger audiences, would be a mistake and we'd both get in a lot of trouble. The idea was mercifully abandoned.
But, here is the original interview, as it appeared in 2020, about The Beastmaster and Krull:
