Kumail Nanjiani attends the Premiere of 20th Century Fox's "Stuber"

Kumail Nanjiani Made Our Day With an Instagram Thirst Trap and Its Very Honest Caption

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Kumail Nanjiani has had a banner couple of years, between shooting into the national superstardom spotlight with Silicon Valley, getting an Oscar nomination for The Big Sick (along with his co-writer/producer and wife Emily Gordon), and joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the upcoming The Eternals, just to name a few of his recent projects.

He also, it turns out, has gotten incredibly ripped.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

I never thought I’d be one of those people who would post a thirsty shirtless, but I’ve worked way too hard for way too long so here we are. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I found out a year ago I was going to be in Marvel’s Eternals and decided I wanted to transform how I looked. I would not have been able to do this if I didn’t have a full year with the best trainers and nutritionists paid for by the biggest studio in the world. I’m glad I look like this, but I also understand why I never did before. It would have been impossible without these resources and time. So big thanks to @grantrobertsfit who started working with me at the beginning of the year and made me understand true physical pain for months and months. Then, once we started shooting, a massive thanks to @davidhigginslondon and his team (@ellispartridge, @thebeardypt, @tomcheesemanfitness) for training me almost every day and making me strong, limber and injury free. I can almost touch my toes now. (And thank you for forcing me to do cheat meals David.) Matthews Street Catering for their delicious and healthy meals. And finally, the biggest thanks goes to @emilyvgordon for putting up with me complaining and talking about only working out and dieting for the last year. I promise I’ll be interesting again some day. #thirstyshirtless (Photo by @markupson.)

A post shared by @ kumailn on

Nanjiani shared that post on Instagram Monday morning, while everyone over on Twitter had their day absolutely derailed.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles comedy fans are all yelling in unison:

While we all appreciate Nanjiani being so generous with these thirst shots, we’re even more grateful for the message in his caption. We’ve seen a lot of stars go through this sort of blockbuster body transformation, especially for Marvel movies. But it’s rare that an actor publicly acknowledges just how unrealistic these kinds of results are if you don’t have access to the same resources.

“I would not have been able to do this if I didn’t have a full year with the best trainers and nutritionists paid for by the biggest studio in the world,” he wrote. “I’m glad I look like this, but I also understand why I never did before. It would have been impossible without these resources and time.”

These sorts of circumstances don’t make this kind of intense regimen easy, but they do make it possible. Getting this ripped was basically his (I’m guessing extremely well-paying) job for the better part of a year—and not just that, but it was other people’s job as well. He thanked five different personal trainers in that caption! That’s an incredibly important element of the celebrity fitness fantasy that often gets left out of the story or at least heavily minimized.

So thank you to Kumail for making our day with these pictures and also being totally realistic about how they came to be.

(image: Jesse Grant/Getty Images)
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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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