Separating the real from the make-believe was all part of creating ‘The Big Sick,’ says its cast
As the cast of the semi-autobiographical “The Big Sick” filters into a Four Seasons suite for an interview, co-writer and star Kumail Nanjiani apologizes in advance.
“We don’t get to see each other often,” he says, “so these things do get derailed because we’re also catching up.”
“The Big Sick,” which opened over the summer, recounts the story of Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon’s actual cross-cultural courtship. After a breakup instigated by Nanjiani, Gordon contracts a deadly infection leading to a medically induced coma. Her parents fly in, the tensions flare.
Did we mention it’s a comedy? The SAG-nominated film wrings laughs and pathos from an actual life-or-death situation with characters based on people who are now Nanjiani’s family.
To an outsider, the cast functions like a kind of family unit itself. Nanjiani is the dutiful eldest son. Zoe Kazan, who plays the screen version of Gordon, is the high-achieving daughter. Ray Romano, playing Emily’s father, is the nice-guy dad. Oscar winner Holly Hunter (Emily’s movie mom) speaks the least, but everyone shuts up when she does.
Producer Judd Apatow, who helped shepherd the script through an extensive revision process, recalls being attracted to “the conflict between [Nanjiani] trying to honor the wishes of his [Pakistani parents], who want him to have an arranged marriage, and his desire to break away and be his own person,” he says. “It’s also about the immigrant experience in our country,” Apatow adds in a conversation separate from his cast. “Suddenly, it had deeper meaning because our country wasn’t treating immigrants the same way they were in the previous administration.”
Kumail approached playing himself the way an actor would tackle playing Hamlet. He studied the character’s motivations.
— Michael Showalter
Meanwhile, director Michael Showalter didn’t want to feel as if they were actually re-creating Gordon and Nanjiani’s life. “I’ve always had a disconnect in my head between the real Kumail and the movie Kumail, and the real Emily and Zoe’s character,” says Showalter. Even Nanjiani, the only actor playing himself, didn’t just play himself.
“Kumail approached playing himself the way an actor would tackle playing Hamlet. He studied the character’s motivations. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we’d just start rolling the cameras and it would all be there,” Showalter says by phone.
As for the cast, now settling in at the Four Seasons, they were given an unusual amount of input into the process of creating these roles based on real people but not really meant to be them. Gordon’s parents, for instance, were drastically changed with the inclusion of Hunter and Romano, and a marital crisis was added.
Nanjiani: What really helped was rewriting it with these three, once they were all on board.
Hunter: I had a conversation with [producer] Barry Mendel: ‘I want you to know this is really collaborative.” The way that he phrased it and that he said it a few different times, I went, “This is true.”
Romano: To believe a producer, you’ve got to hear it a couple of times. [laughter]
Hunter: Everybody says things are really collaborative, and sometimes that can break down really quickly. [laughter] But it really was.
Romano: With Judd being involved, it was going to be open to whatever we wanted to bring. I wrote a little back story. … Right away, Michael Showalter was like, “I’m gonna make this [back story] part of the thing.”
Kazan: [To Nanjiani] I felt that doing something mimetic [of Emily] would have been sort of like falling into an uncanny valley for you. I mean, we’re already similar enough. I think that would have been confusing for you.
Nanjiani: We wanted them to feel like real people, but different.
Romano: Emily’s mother said, ‘Holly’s better looking than me, but your father’s better looking than Ray Romano.’ [laughter]
Nanjiani: When you’re young you have all these ideas in your head: “The perfect woman will have this list of things.” Then you become a grown-up and you realize, “Those things don’t matter; what matters is having a real connection with someone.” Then when I met Emily, I had a real connection and all those things, so it was kind of magical.
Kazan: That’s very romantic.
Nanjiani: It was the same thing when Zoe auditioned. She and Emily shared some essential quality I can’t describe; some energy or something I think they recognize too. It was not even really a discussion. She came in and she was so ready.
Kazan: [pleased] I was very prepared.
Nanjiani: I’ve been a fan of Holly’s forever, and “Broadcast News” was one of our comps for this – grown-ups having grown-up problems in grown-up ways. Then Judd said, “It should be Holly Hunter”; he went on this big, long thing about why it should be her, and we were like, “You had us at ‘Holly Hunter.’” [laughter]
Hunter: Ray and I have a lot of moments [on screen] that aren’t definitive. They’re the small conflicts that married couples have when you’ve been together a long time. It’s the compromises you make that are benign. [To Romano] I think you and I both wanted history on the screen.
Nanjiani: With Ray, again, Judd had a masterstroke –
Romano: He had a stroke, is what it was. [laughter]
Nanjiani: He said, “It should mirror [Kumail and Emily’s] relationship in that they’re from different worlds.” Holly and Ray, their energies are so different and so complementary.
Hunter: Ray raises the bar —
Romano: Me? I’m trying to grab your bar.
Hunter: There’s such depth to what he brings to the set. The thoughts and the focus he brings to the scenes. Ray does an intense amount of homework.
Kazan: One thing that set us up for success on set was the stakes of it being based on your real story. Everyone showed up ready to give a piece of themselves. No one was being paid on this film, but everybody showed up as if everything was on the line. Every player, hair and makeup and costume.
Nanjiani: I had such a fun time making this movie, I could not wait to get back to work. On Sundays I’d be like, “Why are we just sitting around? Why don’t we get back to doing that thing we were doing?”
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