How this couple’s real-life story became the rom-com of the year

A REAL life love story has inspired the latest hit movie from Trainwreck director Judd Apatow.

HOW’S this for a meet-cute: Boy meets girl after she heckles his stand-up comedy show.

Girl thinks boy is cute, but girl is doing postgraduate studies, and doesn’t think she has time to date.

And yet, girl and boy kiss outside a falafel restaurant, writes Whimn.

Girl and boy start spending more time together. But boy is from Pakistan, and girl is white. Boy’s parents don’t approve — they don’t even know she exists — and boy’s parents are trying to set up an arranged marriage for boy. Boy and girl break up.

Then girl falls sick, sicker than she’s ever been before, so sick she is instantly hospitalised and placed in a medically-induced coma while doctors scramble to identify the source of her mystery, debilitating illness.

Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani in Sydney. Their love story inspired the film The Big Sick. Picture: Justin Lloyd

What happens next, plus everything that has come before, is the incredible true story of Kumail Nanjiani, comedian and star of Silicon Valley, and his wife Emily V. Gordon, whimn reports.

It’s also the story of their film The Big Sick, a Judd Apatow-produced romantic comedy in cinemas next week.

It’s “the best romantic comedy in years,” according to rave reviews.

Nanjiani stars as himself, or an amplified, larger-than-life, Apatow-ised version of himself, while indie starlet Zoe Kazan plays Emily.

The first half of the film charts their slow dance towards intimacy.

In the second half of the movie Emily is comatose.

Scene from the movie The Big Sick. Roadshow Pictures.

Her parents, played by the absolutely, completely wonderful Holly Hunter and Ray Romano with his masterful, slow-burn comedic timing, rush to her side and Kumail is thrust into the centre of a family he thought he would never be a part of.

“We wrote the first draft for four years,” Nanjiani tells us in our interview with the pair, “and it’s such a personal thing. It was like getting an emotional colonoscopy.”

“Oh my God,” Gordon laughs, a grimace spreading across her face. “Your metaphors are getting worse by the day!”

“We really had to plumb the depths of ourselves,” Nanjiani jokes, of taking their very personal love story and transforming it for the big screen.

Some details, like the breakdown of Emily’s parents’ marriage, were fictionalised for the purposes of drama.

Holly Hunter and Ray Romano play Emily’s parents. Roadshow Pictures.

But the worn-in familiarity of their eleven-year relationship is woven through every scene.

Emily really did wear a red sweatshirt with a cartoon brain on it, like she does in the film. Kumail really did model his teenage haircut on Hugh Grant, his idol.

Emily really did heckle Kumail with a “woo-hoo” at their meet-cute.

She really did get sick, and in the darkest, lowest moments of her illness, Kumail really did sit in his car, like he does in the movie, calling Emily’s phone just to listen to her voicemail message.

“I had a billion voicemails from Kumail [when I woke up],” Gordon has said. “He was just calling to listen to my voice.”

It’s the kind of poetic, heartbreaking scene you might expect in a romantic comedy, coincidentally Nanjiani’s favourite genre of film.

“I liked Four Weddings and a Funeral because Hugh Grant doesn’t feel like this alpha guy,” Nanjiani muses.

Scene from the movie The Big Sick. Roadshow Pictures.

“He’s like a shy, stuttering guy, and he’s good with the ladies! And I was like, well, I’m a shy stuttery guy, maybe I could be good with the ladies,” he laughs.

Gordon’s relationship with the genre is a little more laboured.

“I think if you’re a woman and you watch a lot of rom-coms you think that if a guy is mean to you for a long time then he’s in love with you, and you’re supposed to be in love with him,” she says. “That’s why I don’t like [them].”

Nanjiani was clear that he wanted to take his encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre — “every rom-com in the ‘90s and early 2000s, I’ve watched,” he has said — and turn it on its head.

“So in a rom-com there’s generally a grand gesture, and the woman falls back into his arms,” Nanjiani explains.

Scene from the movie The Big Sick. Roadshow Pictures.

“Swoons!” Gordon adds, grinning, with a hand to her forehead.

And yes, there is a moment in The Big Sick when Kumail becomes just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to love him.

But it doesn’t quite work out that way.

“We wanted you to feel that these two people would have been perfectly fine if they didn’t get back together. It would be really lovely for them to be together, but they don’t need each other for survival.”

What you get, then, in The Big Sick is a romantic comedy told from the woman’s perspective. When Kumail forces Emily to watch a B-grade horror movie on their second date, she deadpans “I love it when men test me on my taste.”

Later, there’s a perfect, perfect scene that will be so familiar to any woman who has ever spent the night at a man’s house.

Scene from the movie The Big Sick. Roadshow Pictures.

Emily desperately tries to get out of Kumail’s apartment but he won’t let her leave.

Finally, she yells “I need to take a s***!” with alarming urgency, and the two collapse into laughter.

“Emily hasn’t pooped in the 11 years we’ve been together,” Nanjiani jokes. “She should go get that looked at by a doctor.”

“I’ve had so many brunches with women where we all recall what we’ve had to do to take care of business early in a relationship, and I thought, I’d never seen that in a movie. And that scene was on the chopping block several times, I’m so glad it made it in.”

In The Big Sick, Kumail drives Emily back to her house, so that she can go to the bathroom in peace.

It’s the grandest gesture I’ve ever seen in a romantic comedy.

“That means he must care about me,” Gordon smiles.

After years of despising rom-coms, Gordon admits she does like her own one.

“I would always be the best friend in those [rom-com] movies. I would never be the lead,” she explains, before jumping up in her seat, grinning. “Oh my god! I’m the lead of one right now!”

“Congratulations,” Nanjiani smiles.

Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s The Big Sick is in cinemas on August 3.

Originally published in Whimn

Originally published as How this couple’s real-life story became the rom-com of the year