It’s been an unconventional journey for comedian Kumail Nanjiani, one that’s taken him from Karachi, Pakistan to a small college in Iowa and then on to life as a struggling stand-up before finding success on the “Late Show With David Letterman” and HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”
And in the midst of that professional journey came a personal one as he got a call that his ex-girlfriend had fallen into an undiagnosed coma and he rushed to the hospital to be with her.
Oh, that ex-girlfriend — Emily V. Gordon — is now Nanjiani’s wife and writing partner on “The Big Sick.” The very funny but tender comedy, produced by Judd Apatow, has been drawing raves since it premiered at Sundance in January. It begins a limited release in theaters Friday and goes wider July 14.
“Emily is the funniest person I know, and it’s weird because we have friends who are comedians who say the same thing,” declares Nanjiani when we talked in Los Angeles last week.
“The Big Sick” loosely tells the story of how the couple met, split and eventually reunited because of the life-changing experience of the coma. Nanjiani plays the Kumail of the film, while Zoe Kazan portrays Emily.
Holly Hunter and Ray Romano take on the roles her parents, and parents — both his and hers — figure a lot into the story.
“I think disappointing your parents is maybe the most relatable thing in the entire world,” says the comedian.
In the film and in real life, Emily caught Kumail’s eye during a show in a Chicago bar when she let out a “Whoo!” after he asked if anybody in the house was from Karachi, which is where Nanjiani grew up.
When they met a couple of days later, the comedian found that they shared the same sensibilities.
“We find the same stuff funny,” he said. “We like horror and sci-fi movies, video games.”
Despite the attraction, the two kept it casual for months. Emily, who was from North Carolina, had been divorced and wasn’t eager to dive into a relationship, and he was from a Muslim-American family and not supposed to be dating anyone outside the religion.
In fact, his family was actively trying to arrange a marriage for him, though he kept trying to duck out.
At the time in 2006, he worked as an information technology specialist and was trying to launch his stand-up career. In the updated movie version, he’s an Uber driver, and Emily, who was a family therapist, calls him for rides.
The movie adds some ups and downs to their pre-coma time together but essentially sticks to the real story that Kumail kept the fact he was dating a non-Muslim from his parents.
One night about five months into their relationship, Nanjiani got a call that Emily was in the emergency room. So he rushed to the hospital where the medical staff pressed him to sign a release form as her husband so they could treat her. After giving Emily an anesthetic, she fell into a coma.
Nanjiani stayed by her side for a week while the doctors tried to figure out why. In the meantime, her parents showed up.
“We knew from when we first talked to Judd about the story that the core relationship of the movie would be Kumail and Emily’s parents,” says Nanjiani. “You’re really the only people who can relate to a situation like this, and we really became a unit while going through this real-life crisis.”
They zeroed in on getting Oscar-winner Hunter to play Beth, Emily’s mom.
“She is so direct and frank and open,” says Nanjiani. “We thought it will be a real nightmare for someone like Kumail to be in touch with his feelings or deal with anything messy to be stuck with Holly.”
Apatow suggested Romano play Terry, Emily’s dad.
“He understood that Ray was a really great actor and that maybe the world hadn’t seen that aspect of him,” says Nanjiani, noting the parents — one a New Yorker and one a Southerner — were from different worlds.
“We wanted her parents not to make sense in the same way that Emily and I did make sense,” he adds.
He notes that Emily’s parents are different from the characters in the movie.
The way the comedian’s parents are shown in “The Big Sick” is closer to reality.
“It’s easy for a movie like this for the Pakistani family to be rigid in their ways, but my family is very funny, and that is what we want to capture,” he says, noting one of the jokes in the film came straight from his dad. “Families are complicated. They can be funny and loving but also stern and disapproving and supportive.”
Nanjiani is from a family of doctors. His parents moved to New Jersey when he was a teen, and he went to college in Iowa, where he got the comedy bug.
“I didn’t want to be a doctor, and that was OK, but I think they thought the comedy thing was like a fun, weird hobby,” he says.
And that’s OK, too, as long as he didn’t quit his job, but Nanjiani did that eventually as well as telling them about Gordon and marrying her.
It’s not an unusual immigrant story: A family moves to America, bringing their own traditions with them, and then their offspring take to the U.S. culture more than the parents wish. Things either work out or don’t. In Nanjiani’s case it has, but the story is a bit more unusual because it involved a Muslim-American family, and he had his wife wrote a comedy about it.
“We had very different experiences of the same thing,” says the comedian. “We can say we went through this thing together and didn’t.”
No spoiler, Emily recovers although the doctors were baffled for a while. The event also proved life-changing for both of them.
Not long after, the couple moved from Chicago to New York City. She gave up family therapy and became a writer. She wrote a book called “Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero” and has written for such comedy series as “The Carmichael Show” and “Crashing.”
For Nanjiani, it changed his own comedy.
“If you notice in the movie the stuff at the beginning was observational, jokes and one-liners, and at the end, it’s more personal me talking about my parents, the first time I came to America,” he said.
One of his first big gigs was on Letterman’s show in 2009.
The comedian gives Apatow credit for giving the couple a chance to show what they could do, something the producer-writer-director has done with people such as Lena Dunham, Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer.
He and Gordon began writing the script back in 2012 and every few months would send a version to Apatow. They would then meet with him, and he would rip it apart.
That went on for around three years when the producer finally told them the script was good enough to get a director attached, which they did in Michael Showalter (“Hello, My Name Is Doris”), and financing.
“I get the sense that with Judd the onus is on you to keep writing and sending him stuff because he’s not short of projects,” says Nanjiani. “Right before we started shooting, Judd said, ‘It’s really impressive you guys hung in there, because most people would’ve quit by now.’ ”
The comedian seems slightly stunned by the acclaim “The Big Sick” has been receiving. He doesn’t know what it means for his career yet. The fourth season of HBO’s hit show “Silicon Valley,” where he plays computer-program designer Dinesh, ends this Sunday, and the series will start filming the fifth season in October.
“It’s really lovely to have a job like that where that is fun and funny and have the rest of the year to spend time doing other kinds of projects,” he says.
He would like to write something else with his wife, although at the moment he’s trying to get through the promotion for “The Big Sick.”
While filming, Gordon was on the set most days, so she got to see Kumail re-enact parts of their life with another actress. There was one scene, though, that was a little too close to home for Nanjiani: A heavy make-out scene with Kazan.
“Emily was fine with it, and Zoe was, too,” he says. “I just thought it would be weird, and a kissing scene is nerve-racking anyway.”
So he asked his wife if it would be OK if she weren’t around for scene because it would make him feel self-conscious.
“She was very understanding,” he says with a smile.
