Kumail Nanjiani was approached about doing a Big Sick sequel

It's a movie based on his life, but he says his life became boring after that

By Sam Barsanti  |  November 13, 2022 | 11:26pm
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Kumail Nanjiani was approached about doing a Big Sick sequel
Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani Photo: CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images

Director Michael Showalter’s excellent 2017 rom-com The Big Sick doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would or could ever justify a sequel—if you ignore the fact that it made good money and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, of course. Inspired by the real-life relationship between writers Kumail Nanjiani (who also stars as a version of himself) and Emily V. Gordon, the movie covers the story of how Nanjiani and Gordon (the version of her is played by Zoe Kazan) met and started dating shortly before Gordon was put into a medically induced coma.

She got better and they got married, and that’s kind of the whole story. In the context of the movie, you can sort of predict what happens next because the real Kumail and Emily are still married and later went on to write a movie about the experience. And yet, while appearing at Vulture Festival for a live taping the Good One podcast, Nanjiani revealed that he and Gordon have “actually been contacted about a sequel.” He said he wasn’t sure about it, though, explaining, “our lives became boring after that.”

That makes perfect sense, since one of the things that made The Big Sick good is that it captured a real thing that happened to real people and took inspiration from how they really reacted to it, but making a sequel would inevitably require constructing some kind of second story. Then again, season four of Seinfeld, when they’re making the Jerry pilot, is pretty funny… so maybe Nanjiani and Gordon should’ve just made a second Big Sick movie that was all about making a fictionalized version of the first Big Sick movie. Kumail Nanjiani playing a fictionalized version of the fictionalized version of himself, some other actor playing Zoe Kazan (while she continues playing a fictionalized version of Emily V. Gordon). Now that we think about it, we’re totally on board with this.

 
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