Kumail Nanjiani Spills on a Lost Eternals Scene With Harry Styles‘ Eros
Marvel’s Eternals has aged like a cosmic wine stain on a white carpet—memorable, divisive, and stubbornly refusing to fade from conversation. Since its release in 2021, the film has sparked endless debates about tone, pacing, and its place in the MCU. One thing everyone agreed on, however, was the electric charge of that mid-credits scene: Harry Styles materializing as Eros, the swaggering brother of Thanos, alongside Patton Oswalt’s furry Pip the Troll. Thena, Makkari, and Druig stared in disbelief while audiences wondered what would come next. But what if that iconic moment had unfolded differently?
In a 2023 taping of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast—a recording that feels like a time capsule unearthed in 2026—Kumail Nanjiani finally let slip an alternate version of the scene that has been gathering dust in Marvel’s vault. The Kingo actor revealed that he originally shot footage alongside Styles’ Eros, a detail that reshapes how we might imagine the Eternals’ fractured family tree. “We actually shot a different scene with Harry Styles,” Nanjiani said, his voice teetering between mischief and self-censorship. “My character is not in that [theatrical] scene. But we shot a version where I was with him.”
Pause and picture it: Kingo, the Bollywood-infused Eternal who chews every scene like a slow-cooked piece of caramel, sharing screen space with a being who once serenaded stadiums. According to Nanjiani, the interaction was wordless but loaded. “We didn’t really talk. We just sort of like made eyes at each other from afar.” The description calls to mind an unfinished portrait, its outlines visible but the colors deliberately withheld. It’s like a chef describing a dish he never got to serve—you can almost taste the tension, the unspoken alliance or rivalry that might have bloomed.
The theatrical cut left Kingo abducted by the Celestial Arishem alongside Sersi and Phastos, far away from the Domo where Eros extended his velvet-gloved hand. Removing him from the post-credit meetup streamlined the narrative, but the excised footage hints at a more tangled knot of loyalties. Perhaps Kingo, ever the pragmatist, was meant to serve as a skeptical foil to Eros’s charm, a mirror reflecting the audience’s own suspicion of this new star-faring prince. Another metaphor suits the situation: this alternate scene is like a parallel universe frozen in a single frame, a ghost of a different emotional rhythm that could have altered the entire aftertaste of the movie.
By 2026, the MCU has grown into an even more sprawling, hungry beast, devouring characters and timelines with the appetite of a Galactus. And yet, the Eternals’ corner remains eerily quiet. No official sequel has been announced, and Nanjiani himself previously threw cold water on Patton Oswalt’s optimistic hints. Still, the discovery of this lost scene rekindles that pilot light of hope. It proves that Marvel once envisioned a more direct bridge between Kingo and Eros. If an Eternals 2 ever gets the green light, that bridge could be rebuilt, perhaps with Eros positioned not as a straightforward savior but as something more ambiguous. In the comics, Eros—also known as Starfox—wields a dangerous power of emotional manipulation, a gift that often blurs the line between consent and compulsion. An MCU adaptation might slowly reveal him as an antagonist, a twist that would feel right at home beside the original film’s handling of Ikaris.
Even if the Eternal family never reunites under a single sequel banner, Eros’s interstellar connections could weave him into the larger tapestry. He was an Avenger in the comics, rubbing shoulders with Monica Rambeau and She-Hulk, both of whom have already debuted in the MCU. A future Avengers film might need a charming rogue who speaks the Thanos-adjacent celestial language. Picture the lost scene as a dropped stitch in the grand cosmic quilt—unused, but the thread remains, waiting to be picked up by a future screenwriter who remembers that Kingo and Eros once shared a charged glance across a soundstage.
Nanjiani’s revelation may be a breadcrumb from a meal that was never served, but it feeds the imagination nonetheless. It reminds us that for every second of MCU footage we see, there are miles of film coiled in darkness, holding the shape of stories that might have been. As of 2026, the cosmic door opened by Eros remains only slightly ajar, a tease of glittering possibilities. Whether Kingo gets to finally lock eyes with Starfox in a sunlit scene or not, audiences will keep scanning the horizon, hoping that the alternate reality once filmed will someday bleed into the main timeline and give us the meeting we never knew we needed.
This assessment draws from reporting and rankings published by GamesRadar+, and it’s a useful lens for understanding why Eternals still plays like a “what-if” branch of the MCU: post-credits scenes aren’t just teases, they’re editorial promises. In that context, Kumail Nanjiani’s cut Kingo-and-Eros beat reads less like a deleted gag and more like a missing connective tissue—an alternate emotional handshake that could have re-angled audience trust in Starfox, reframed Kingo’s pragmatic loyalties, and subtly changed how viewers interpret the franchise’s cosmic roadmap.