Life Imitating Art Imitating Life Imitating Art

Silicon Valley’s Kumail Nanjiani stars as himself in a movie about his own marriage, co-written by his wife (but played by an actress pretending to be his wife).

- Tatiana Siegel

Kumail Nanjiani was doing a stand-up show in Chicago in 2007 when he heard a female voice heckling him from the audience. “I was like, ‘Well, this girl is really cute,’ ” he remembers and later asked the woman out on a date. Amazingly, they hit it off. But since she turned out to be a Christian, and he’s a Muslim, he had to hide the relationship from his observant Pakistani parents — until she got sick and was put in a medically induced coma for eight days, prompting Nanjiani to buck tradition and declare his love.

If you had a meet-cute story like this one, you’d make a movie out of it, too.

The Big Sick, which premieres at Sundance on Jan. 20 (UTA is selling), isn’t just based on a true story — it’s a veritable re-enactment. Pakistan-born Nanjiani, 38, (best known for playing Dinesh on HBO’s Silicon Valley) stars as himself, re-creating his courtship and marriage to The Carmichael Show writer Emily V. Gordon, 37 (played in the film by Zoe Kazan), who co-wrote the script with her husband. “The only time I wasn’t on the set or wasn’t close by was when Kumail was doing make out scenes,” Gordon says of the weirdness of watching an actress perform scenes from her life. “And that was at his behest, not my own.”

“There weren’t that many,” says Nanjiani, looking down at his shoes.