I was in a coma and nothing changed, I'm the exact same person.
Who cares?
I learned nothing.
Yeah, and if you read it you'd be like
"Well, this woman is going through some shit right now."
And together they turned that horrifying experience
Into the comedy, The Big Sick.
Firstly guys, it's lovely to meet you.
Thank you, nice to meet you too.
I want to talk about your movie, I want to talk about your lives, but I do want to start with
life in a coma.
Because you wrote this beautiful letter for Lenny Letter.
Oh, yes.
And there's a great bit where you describe being in a coma
and I'm wondering, did you really think that one of the male nurses
was evil and had candy for fingers?
Yes.
Jolly Rancher hands.
It's interesting how your brain tries to do it's best to kind of take what you're getting
and make sense of it, when I didn't know what was happening.
So I had all kinds of these elaborate storylines I'd created.
I thought I was visiting Kumail in the hospital.
Cause I knew I was in a hospital I'm like, "I'm fine, so I guess I'm here for Kumail."
Cause you were wearing your glasses.
I remember that you were like...
And what a weird thing that I somehow knew that.
And then I thought
that I was trapped, I was working at an institution.
I worked with people with schizophrenia.
Can't think of the term for it for some reason.
So then I thought I had been locked accidentally into one of those
and I was a patient and needed to get out.
And that's where Dr. Sticky Hands came into it.
You don't have to worry about being committed to anything, Kumail.
You didn't want to when she was awake
there's no need to do it when she's unconscious.
It's more complicated than that.
You really don't have to stay, Kumail.
You have already done...
I'm just going to stay for a second.
In all the roles that you've done, is it true that you actually had to hire an acting coach to play yourself?
'cause that sounds like a very odd thing to do.
Well, because I'd only done comedy stuff you know?
Comedy is a lot of...
I just felt comfortable doing the comedy.
You have good instincts for comedy.
I just felt comfortable doing comedy stuff.
And then with some of the serious stuff in this, I'd just never done it before.
So I wanted to feel confident going into it.
I just wanted to feel like I knew what I was doing.
So with my acting coach, we did a lot of
scenes from 'Awakenings', 'Fisher King'
Any movie with a coma I did monolouges from.
Cause there's a lot of movies with monolouges of people
talking to someone while they're in a coma.
So I've done all of those.
I was really impressed with that, because I do think
and it's only as we've been doing press that I've realised
He could have easily been like "Oh this is my life, I don't need to prep for it."
And I think that's what an amateur would have done.
Whereas I think you realising "Oh I'm going to need extra help with this."
Just because you've lived through it doesn't mean that you're the best per-
You're right I am really cool.
I'm a really great guy.
I didn't say good guy I said good actor.
Great guy.
Did you have a strategy for how you were going to sit back and watch casting videos of
women come in and play you flirting with your husband?
I wish I had.
Like did you have a strategy for how you were going to handle that?
I just was like, "this'll be cool."
And then I watched it and I was like
"Oh this isn't cool, I feel terrible."
And I remember we were walking home from a restaurant
and it was along walk and I was like, I started kind of being like
"I don't know, why did we do this?"
And you were kind of joking and I was like
"This isn't funny, I don't know."
And so I just had...
I tend to have like a 10 minute freakout
and then I'm fine.
I think you've just got to put your big girl pants on and be like
I want to write this movie and I want the movie to be good.
And that means that I've got to kind of be okay with
with you making out with someone else on camera.
and calling them Emily.
There is a moment in your life where you have to have this conversation with your parents
that you're going to making this comedy about what was for them super traumatic.
Your parents really struggles with the concept didn't they?
How did they react?
My mum just said, "I don't know how you could ever make this funny."
"And I don't know why it could ever be funny."
She felt like we were doing a disservice to-
Because she didn't get it.
We just had a lot of conversations of
"Mum you know me.
I took this more seriously than anyone."
She was like "it wasn't funny to live through."
Yeah so you have to kind of trust that we're gonna do it justice
and not gonna do anything that's gonna
be upsetting to watch or feel like we're making fun of it.
And she...
We never showed them the script
but we kind of talked them through
You never show them the script?
No, we talked them through the script.
We told them everything that we changed.
My mum would have sold it to Hollywood Reporter.
No.
They would've probably never read it, frankly.
If we gave them like, "here's this long thing to read."
So we just kind of talked them through all the ins and outs of their characters.
And the movie in general.
So there were no surprises whatsoever.
So by the time both sets of parents watched it they knew what was coming.
"I wonder who that could be?"
"I'm guessing it's a young single pakistani woman."
"This is Zubeida."
"For your files, your X-files.
"That's your favourite show, huh?"
"The truth is out there."
When you write from your parents' perspective
particularly with your parents and the conversations around arranged marriages
Do you feel like you have a greater appreciation for what they intended for you?
Yes.
I just understood that, the struggle to hold onto your culture in another country
where that culture isn't really valued.
It's difficult.
And it's your identity.
So them telling me how I should live my life isn't them trying to control me
it's them trying too...
hold onto their identity.
And that's something that's very...
that's a really noble cause.
It's interesting because, the movie is kind of decidedly apolitical but I'm wondering...
can you make a film that stars a normalised Muslim-American family in 2017
and have it not be political?
No, I don't think you can.
I really don't think you can.
What helped us is we decided
as you said we were like, this is an apolitical movie.
We don't want to make any point we just want to tell the story.
But the reality of the world in which it is released
means that it is...
Just the fact that I'm Pakistani she's American.
Just us being together is almost a political statement.
I do think, you know..
I hate that that's political, I don't want it to be political
I just think it's cool
And cool is a very reductive thing to say but I think it's...
It's something we need to see, just like anything else.
And that's all we really wanted to show.
But the truth of it is, it is seen as political.
Emily...
What are the longterm impacts of nearly dying?
How does it change your personality, to know that was something you had to go through?
I think initially I was very adamant that nothing, I didn't change at all.
And that this was just a blip in my life, and absolutely nothing had changed.
And that could not have been further from the truth.
I wrote a really horrible essay
It's not horrible it's lovely I read it this morning-
No not that one, I wrote one right after being sick.
Getting out of the hospital, that the website has since been shut down thank goodness.
It's been scrubbed.
It was just awful.
Why was it awful?
It was just literally like
"I was in a coma and nothing changed.
I'm the exact same person.
Who cares?"
I learned nothing.
And that's cool.
If you read it you'd be like, "this woman is going through some shit right now."
She is in crisis right now.
She is spiraling.
And I'm a therapist, I had a masters degree, I'd practised for years.
And I still couldn't see that within myself that like
Oh, it's going to take me a while to process this.
But it's all the most cliche stuff on Earth.
Just gives you a real appreciation for the fact that all this stuff is temporary
and how fleeting everything is.
There's very little that scares me now.
There's very little that could happen to me
or that you could say to me, being rejected for a job.
If this movie hadn't done well
Any of that stuff doesn't compare to
waking up and realising, oh I could have died.
And I didn't even know it.
And that could have all gone away.
So I think...
I'm definitely less cynical than I used to be.
Are you still anxious about your health?
All the time.
Like you might not wake up one day?
I'm very anxious about my health still, both of us are.
Absolutely.
And so that's something we're still managing kind of 10 years later.
Guys, you're an absolute pleasure to talk to.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed this, thanks so much.
Now here's the awkward part where I try and shake both your hands at the same time.
Yeah we did it!