Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon knew their love story was a little unconventional. But they were never like, ‘Whoa, this needs to be a movie.’

At least not right away.

But after Nanjiani, who plays the sarcastic coder Dinesh on HBO’s Silicon Valley, recounted how he and Gordon met and fell in love to producer-director Judd Apatow, The Big Sick, a romantic-comedy based on their own extraordinary union, took shape.

“I told him a couple of made up stories and then this one,” Nanjiani told the Sun ahead of the film’s Toronto premiere. “And when he heard the story of me and Emily he said, ‘This is what we’re doing together.’

“I got a little obsessed with the idea of doing this,” he continues. “I said to Emily, ‘I don’t think we can do any other meaningful story unless we do this one first.’”

The film tracks the relationship between a Muslim-American standup comic obsessed with Hugh Grant, Kumail (played by Nanjiani), and a blond grad student named Emily (played by Zoe Kazan) who meet after she heckles him on stage. But their romance fizzles when Emily finds out that Kumail’s parents expect him to marry a fellow Muslim.

Then things take a further turn for the worse when Emily is stricken by a mystery illness and hospitalized in a coma.

All of which actually happened to Gordon.

But the illness made Nanjiani realize how important his relationship with Gordon really was.

Also true.

“I was terrified we were going to bungle this and you only get one shot,” Nanjiani says. “This is a story that’s tremendously important to us and they’re not going to reboot this movie if it doesn’t work.”

After Apatow signed on to produce, the real-life couple snagged Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer) to direct from a script that they co-wrote together.

It was cathartic for Gordon to relive the Hollywood-ized version of her life, which features Kumail befriending Emily’s parents, played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, while she’s comatose.

“It was nice to right some of the wrongs of our past by writing a funnier, cooler version of our life,” Gordon says.

So did they really meet after she heckled him on stage?

“He said, ‘Is Pakistan in the house,’ and I woo-hooed because no one else said anything,” Gordon says smiling. “It wasn’t sarcastic... I thought he needed a little assistance in that moment.”

“I will say, and this is the first time I’m saying it, I’m so glad you did that,” Nanjiani replies.

The Big Sick has been hailed by critics as one of the best of the year. But Nanjiani is just happy that he and Gordon have nudged the rom-com genre back into the positive column.

“Just like there was a ton of bad action movies, there were a ton of bad rom-coms and that killed the genre a little bit,” he says. “People started using rom-com as an insult. We wanted to make one that was inspired by really great ones; one that we’d like to watch.”

“I hope people see it and see themselves in it,” Gordon adds. “I hope people see that universality of the emotion of falling in love and disappointing our parents and having to deal with medical stuff — all that stuff is universal.”

Now that they’ve had success writing one movie together, what’ll they tackle for an encore? The werewolf genre.

“Not the Wolfman, that’s something completely separate,” Nanjiani jokes.

“We have competing werewolf ideas – I have the female version and he has the male version,” Gordon chuckles. “I think we should write them both and see whose is better.”

“It will be like Bug’s Life and Antz,” Nanjiani laughs.

The Big Sick is now playing in select cities. It will expand across Canada on July 7 and July 14.

Twitter:@markhdaniell

MDaniell@postmedia.com