Meet Nathan Fielder, the king of cringe comedy

Illustration by Andy Bunday

The first series of The Rehearsal, which won the 2022 Independent Spirit award for best comedy, was a surreal improv supernova of simulations and role-playing taken to elaborate, deranged extremes.

Fielder built a full-size replica of a bar and enlisted actors just so a man called Kor Skeete could rehearse a confession to a fellow quiz team member about lying about having a master’s degree. In another rehearsal, a woman unsure about having children is given an accelerated mock-up of motherhood, with different-aged child actors – and child robots – playing roles from babies to teenagers.

The new series of The Rehearsal, just concluded in the US, takes Fielder’s signature brand of docureality vérité even further. It focuses on aviation safety and his conviction that plane crashes are caused by miscommunication between captains and co-pilots. This is by no means a new idea and is widely discussed within the industry and beyond, but Fielder takes a unique and dramatic approach to the issue.

One scenario morphs into full-scale replicas of airport terminals, the launch of a singing competition called Wings of Voice based on Canadian Idol (on which Fielder was once a junior producer) and an extended fantasy sequence involving Fielder dressed as a baby grotesquely suckling from a giant “mother” ­puppet. The ­aviation simulations climax so shockingly – responses go from “Is he really doing this?” to “Should he be doing this?” – that some may ­wonder at the wisdom of HBO greenlighting Fielder’s costly ­convoluted whims.

Ben Travers of US film and TV website IndieWire tells me he thinks there are two ways to watch The Rehearsal: “You can look at it as: ‘This is Nathan being exactly who is.’ Or look at it as Nathan Fielder – the director, creator, writer, comedian – playing a character that fits the scenario he wants to walk us through on the show.”

Comedian Ken Cheng says of Fielder: “He’s really pushing boundaries. His ideas are unique. He’s willing to lean into it and not follow a formula … The first series of The Rehearsal leans towards almost pure social experiment. It’s still comedy but it’s very avant garde.”

Travers considers The Rehearsal to be a creative “maturation” from Fielder. Certainly, it is a conceptual progression from Fielder’s previous venture Nathan for You, co-created with Michael Koman, which ran for four series between 2013 and 2017. In that show, Fielder ostensibly uses his real-life business qualifications to help struggling small companies: among myriad other stunts, we see poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt production, “ghost realtors”, videos faking hero pigs rescuing goats from drowning at a petting zoo and even a failed attempt to take down Uber.

Just as the counterintuitive premise of The Rehearsal is about how life is intrinsically uncontrollable, Nathan for You operates as a scathing satire on capitalism and the futility of the American dream.

Fielder was raised in Vancouver by parents who were social workers. He had a childhood fascination with magic, and at Point Grey secondary school was in an improv group with fellow Canadian actor Seth Rogen: the team took third place in a national improv competition.

Fielder has described an “obsessive” early interest in comedy – he moved to Toronto to attend Humber College’s comedy programme – but his persona and working methods mean he plays his cards close to his chest and rarely gives interviews or offers personal revelations.

Despite his work still somehow registering as a fresh, subversive YouTube mess-about, he could no longer be classified as underground. People he’s worked with include Emma Stone (in his and Benny Safdie’s 2023 comedy drama series The Curse) and Sacha Baron Cohen (in the 2018 mockumentary series Who Is America?). The latter’s Borat films are often perceived as an influence on Fielder’s work.

Creatively, other influences are thought to include everyone from Chris Morris and Andy Kaufman to Charlie Kaufman. Motifs persisting throughout Fielder’s creations include his Judaism. In Nathan for You, he reacts to a clothing site paying homage to a Holocaust denier by starting his own clothing company, Summit Ice, with profits going to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Summit Ice is still operating; in the new series of The Rehearsal, he attacks Paramount+ for removing this episode from the platform.

Another recurring Fielder theme is his supposed isolation: a private detective in Nathan for You calls him “the wizard of loneliness”. In real life, though, Fielder was married to children’s librarian Sarah Ziolkowska until they divorced in 2014. There are also allusions to Fielder’s possible neurodiversity. Travers, who was granted a rare interview with Fielder, says: “There’s a pretty clear distinction when you see him in real life and talk to him directly. As much of himself that he puts into the shows, I still think he’s very aware that there’s a separation there.”

Cheng observes: “He presents as an everyman in his look and vibe, but he’s definitely an outlier. You can’t see him as anything else but exactly being Nathan Fielder making these shows. I can’t imagine him in a normal job. Or even doing normal comedy.”

The same issue arises with Fielder as it does with Baron Cohen: is he now too famous – that is, exposed – to continue? And if so, what will he do next? It seems significant that Nathan for You’s biggest viral moment, Dumb Starbucks, in which he builds a parody coffee shop, (it is shut down by the department of public health) was initially attributed to Banksy.

Is Fielder essentially a performance artist, a kind of comedic grifter? While most criticisms seem focused on his deadpan, solipsistic persona, he has also been accused of manipulation, elitism, coldness and questionable ethics. One contestant duped into entering Wings of Voice complained about the waste of her time and money. In the first series of The Rehearsal, when a fatherless child actor became overly attached to Fielder (at that point playing his father), many were troubled – though, in fairness, it was clear that Fielder was too.

A counterargument could be that by taking huge companies to task (Starbucks, Uber, Paramount+), and despite the question marks over his ethics, Fielder has consistently revealed cast-iron values beneath the surrealist pranking-hoaxing sheen. As low-profile and cryptic Fielder is on a personal level, as an artist he continues to be genuinely original, screamingly funny and also principled.

Who’s the intense dude skulking in the shadows in the laptop ­harness? Perhaps someone even more layered than you think.

Nathan Fielder
Born Vancouver
Alma mater University of Victoria, Humber College
Work Comedian
Family Married to Sarah Ziolkowska from 2011-14