In The Curse, Nathan Fielder weaponizes who you think he is
About 15 minutes into the New York Film Festival premiere of The Curse, I felt the large audience of the Alice Tully Hall shift in their seats, en masse. One of the series’ stars — and co-creator and writer — Nathan Fielder, had just done something fairly disarming, and the vibe, collectively and palpably, changed.
Fielder is a popular comedic actor who, based on the proliferation of Warby Parker glasses and baseball caps surrounding me (I say, in jest), most of my audience was specifically here to see. A question that was probably on many of these fans’ minds (myself included, as a longtime fan) is the extent to which Fielder would be debuting as a Big Serious Actor in his first narrative show, or whether he’d be the partly real, partly affected version of Nathan Fielder we’d all come to know and love from the comedic reality shows that had made him famous — the Fielder persona who he himself seemed incapable of shedding. It’s precisely why the scene that noticeably rattled my audience did so in the first place: Fielder was suddenly a character that we didn’t quite recognize.
Nathan Fielder has refined playing a certain type of guy, one who also happens to be a little like who he actually is. Through Nathan for You, he became notorious for his signature on-screen personality style of rigid, throttling discomfort. With his awkward, monotone cadence and slightly uncanny way of interacting with others, he repeatedly put himself at odds with the non-actors in his show by simply allowing awkward moments to play out to excruciating effect. He brought that persona back for his more artistic reality venture, The Rehearsal, last year, which partly served to comment on his documentary style, his own image, and the murky ethics of
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