The Big Sick is a gem of a film for many reasons. The romantic comedy is about a Pakistani-American comedian (Kumail Nanjiani) who falls in love with a white woman (Zoe Kazan), then has to win over her parents after she falls into a coma. It’s both funny and heart-warming, based on the true story of Nanjiani’s relationship with his wife, writer Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote the script with her husband.

Grounding the film are a number of knockout performances—particularly one from Oscar-winning actress Holly Hunter, who plays Beth, Emily’s no-nonsense mother. Beth, who is having some relationship issues of her own with her husband (a charming Ray Romano), is both admirably flinty and idiosyncratic, reminding you why Hunter is one of the best at what she does. In an interview, the actress talks crafting the role, that time she heckled someone at a tennis match, and how Donald Trump is impacting the film’s release.

Vanity Fair: One of the things that struck me is The Big Sick is a romantic comedy, but it really is about Kumail and these parents falling in love with each other too.

Holly Hunter: It’s just so unexpected. That’s not how a rom-com is gonna develop. That’s not gonna be its third act, or its second act. When I read the script, there was something other about the movie.

Because the originality of the intention is so seriously pursued, there was a seriousness on the set. And that sounds weird, because it was a really loose set, unbelievably loose and loving, and yet . . . it had a seriousness, a purpose that some movies don’t have because Kumail was there playing himself, and it was the hardest thing Kumail has ever gone through in his life, to date. We actually never talked about that, but we knew it. That was never mentioned like, “Hey man, this must be really hard for you.” We weren’t doing that. We were talking about the script, we were talking about the scene, we were talking about the possibility of driving the scenes a little more deeply, a little more intimately.

The craft of it all.

The craft!

Did you, by osmosis, learn a lot about his culture?

Yeah, in the greatest way, in a really organic way. And being around Kumail now, I learn things from him. Because this [not learning] is the reason why we have prejudice in the world. This is why we have racism, really, because people are confronting the unknown and they don’t like that. The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that’s as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there’s so many things I don’t know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures—maybe even 18 or 19 of them—when I get on a subway car every day. It’s still a superficial knowing, a superficial recognition, but nevertheless it’s one of the things I love about living here.

It’s a fabulous honor to get to learn about Kumail’s culture in a personal way. That’s one of the great strengths about the movie. It’s apolitical, really. It doesn’t lead with politics at all. The political stuff definitely is there, but that’s not what they were meaning to do.

But it does get put in this political light when you’re like, “Oh, the movie is coming out now, when this person is president.”

Yeah, now. When we shot it, Trump was not president. Things have heated up so unimaginably since that happened that the movie even has different ramifications now than it did when we were shooting it [last summer].

Was that ever a conversation on set?

Yeah, like no way. It’s inconceivable. Especially in New York. That’s a joke. New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.

Did you ever have any run-ins with him?

No, but I knew him through Page Six. We know Trump through Page Six, and that’s a whole other arena from the White House [laughs].

I heard that when the film was shown at Sundance, people were cheering at the scene where Kumail gets heckled during a stand-up set. Did you talk to Kumail about that scene at all?

We talked a bunch, because that scene was not in the original script. That was a real evolution. At that part of the movie, there was no comedy club scene, and they felt that rhythmically, the way that act one, act two, act three was built, that they needed a comedy club scene. It kind of came about through much conversation.

Have you ever been that person in that situation?

Well, I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.

Really?

And you know tennis, it’s not a good place for that.

Not the most natural venue.

It’s not the natural place for heckling. So I had shared that with Kumail.

Do you remember what you said [at the match]?

Let’s not even go there, man. It was a little intense, and probably was not really cool to do. And I am not a heckler. I hardly even know what that is! But I found myself doing it, and Kumail and I talked about that, then Kumail and Emily wrote the scene and it felt right.

They worked really assiduously on this script with [producers] Judd [Apatow] and Barry Mendel, and then when they handed it to us, the actors, they had the confidence and the generosity to trust us. Everybody was contributing. Everybody had ideas. Zoe is so enormously intelligent, and Ray Romano has incredible instincts.

Did you two know each other beforehand, or did you build that rapport on set?

No, but he’s just a powerhouse, and so incredibly smart and intuitive, and so is Zoe. And then Kumail—a natural-born actor. He’s just a natural actor who, in a way, found that out about himself as the movie was going on. He’s wonderful. He merges those two professions, stand-up and actor. They don’t always go together.

Some people cannot pull it off.

Yeah. And Ray and Kumail? It’s easy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.