Kumail Nanjiani Promises That ‘Eternals’ Is Completely Free Of ‘Brown Dude’ Stereotypes

At the moment, Eternals — Chloé Zhao’s highly anticipated post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel movie about the reemergence of an immortal alien race that has been secretly hiding out on Earth for more than 7,000 years — may be best known as the A-lister-filled movie for which Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani got totally ripped. But the Oscar-nominated actor/writer is hoping that its more lasting legacy will be something much more important: That it will be one of the few movies that totally rejects the stereotypes he so often sees in roles for what he calls “brown dudes.”

As IndieWire reports, Nanjiani (who was born in Pakistan) recently spoke with the Los Angeles Times about his upcoming role in Eternals, in which he plays Kingo, a superhero masquerading as a Bollywood star. In addition to discussing his much tweeted-about physical transformation, Nanjiani also spoke about how it was important to him that his character didn’t play into any of the stereotypes he’s run up against throughout his career, saying the following:

“I’ve been in this industry for about a decade and I looked at the usual opportunities that the brown dudes get. We get to be nerdy. I wanted him to be the opposite of that—I wanted him to be cool. With nerdy goes ‘weakling,’ and I wanted him to be the opposite of that and to be strong physically. Or we get to be terrorists, and I wanted him to be the opposite of that. I wanted him to be this character full of joy. In working with Chloé, we were like, let’s take every single thing that I haven’t gotten to do and make a character who’s the exact opposite of the way a lot of American pop culture see people from Pakistan or the Middle East.”

In addition to being an opportunity to turn an all-too-frequent stereotype on its head, Nanjiani also saw this tack as a way for his character to stand out amongst an enormous, and enormously impressive, cast that includes the likes of Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Brian Tyree Henry, and former Game of Thrones buds Richard Madden and Kit Harington.

“I was very lucky that Chloé was really on board with that,” Nanjiani said. “Because when you have like 10 characters, you’re trying to set yourself apart from the other characters and find your own shadings. You’re not going to get a ton of real estate. So you want it to come from a very specific place. I decided going in, I’m going to have fun during this process.”

Eternals is scheduled to be released on November 5, 2021.