How Kumail Nanjiani Got Huge

It all seemed simple enough: Book a Marvel movie, get ripped, feel incredible. But, as Kumail Nanjiani learned, growing into his new body required recalibrating his whole mindset

- Clay Skipper

A while back Kumail Nanjiani struck up a conversation with a stranger at his gym. Bonded by the shared agony of heavy lifting, they wondered aloud to each other: Why do we do this? They decided it was mostly because they’d grown up on the action movies of the 1980s, inhaling the work of stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger who projected a tightly coiled idea of manhood. “We saw these guys who were like Adonises and gods and we were like, ‘Oh, that’s what strong men look like,’ ” Nanjiani tells me. “Not that they can access their feelings, or cry, or say when they’re sad, or say when they’re scared. They have a sixpack up to their necks.”

Nanjiani started working out as a scrawny teenager growing up in Pakistan. He had a huge head and tiny body and hated the way he looked. He remembers at least one classmate calling him Chicken Shoulders. “It would’ve been better if I was like, ‘Hey, I like how I look. Fuck ’em all,’ ” he says. “But I didn’t do that.”