All hail KUMAIL

Despite his performance in 2017’s The Big Sick being nominated for an Outstanding Cast Screen Actors Guild Award – and being cast opposite Angelina Jolie in the 2021 Marvel film The Eternals – Kumail Nanjiani has trouble acknowledging that he is, in fact, a movie star. “Oh my God, no, I honestly do not think of it like that,” he says. “I think of everything as a job. And that I am the luckiest person ever.”

Luck aside, Nanjiani’s success has a lot to do with pushing himself to try to an Oscar-nominated writer for scripting with his wife, Emily V. Gordon. Now he can add “Instagram Famous” to his résumé, after a selfie he took of his body overhaul for went viral. “My parents are still surprised at my career,” he says of his mum and dad, who moved from Pakistan in 2005 and now live in New Jersey. “They’re like, ‘You were so shy and quiet. I don’t know how this is happening.’”