We’re getting more insights into why Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo decided not to participate in saving planet Earth at the end of Marvel’s Eternals, directed by Chloe Zhao.
Nanjiani addressed Kingo’s notable absence during the climax, in which the remaining characters pooled their powers together to stop the Celestial poised to rip Earth apart upon being born in a recent D23 Inside Disney podcast.
“He had a movie to run, he was busy,” joked Nanjiani. Taking a more serious tone, Nanjiani continued:
“Actually, I talked to Chloe about that a lot because it is such a non-standard decision for him to make in the context of a superhero movie. Right, it’s always like, get the group…together and they all fight the things. Chloe really wanted him to leave because she felt that, his perspective, she feels, was the only moral one.”
The climax of the film sees the powerful Eternals be presented with a kind of real-life version of the thought experiment known as the “trolley problem.” The characters are faced with either sacrificing the lives of everyone on Earth by letting a Celestial be born or killing the god-like being, saving humankind. But in saving the Earth, this disallows the birth of countless galaxies the Celestial would have created, leading to several magnitudes more lives lost than just the inhabitants of Earth by comparison.
Nanjiani went on to explain that the film presents basically two “different perspectives.”
“Intellectually, you understand that perhaps the moral thing to do is to let Earth go because then a billion more Earths will come right. So that’s the intellectual way to look at it.”
However, when you view the problem “emotionally,” Kunjiani said, “it’s these people did not choose to be killed, they deserve to live.”
All of the 10 heroes in the movie hold one of these two perspectives, Kunjinai explained. But Zhao made Kingo somewhat unique in that regard.
“She says Kingo is the one who has both perspectives. Because he understands intellectually that perhaps the right thing to do is to follow the Celestials’ mission. But he says he won’t fight his family to do it. So he kind of encompasses both perspectives.”
Eternals is in theaters now.
