A Bollywood dance number was performed in Marvel’s Eternals, by none other than Kumail Nanjiani — but he didn’t quite know it was going to happen.
His character, Kingo, “goes off and becomes a Bollywood movie star,” Nanjiani explained to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. The actor said he is not a dancer in real life, so Eternals director Chloé Zhao had to trick Nanjiani into doing the dance sequence, surprising him with the scene when they arrived to shoot in London.
“I walked into the gym, where we were doing the rehearsal, and I got really emotional. There were like 50 South Asian people,” he said. “So many years, you barely have any South Asian people and suddenly there’s like 52 of us in one scene, you know?”
Fallon played a clip of Nanjiani in the dance scene, to much applause and delight from the audience. To quote Nanjiani, “Yeah! Cheer for South Asia!”
