Nathan Fielder: From Nathan For You to The Rehearsal, The Curse and Beyond
A business graduate from Vancouver who built a career out of awkward silences, absurd schemes and real people. The full story of Nathan Fielder’s work, project by project.
Nathan Fielder is a Canadian comedian and filmmaker, born in Vancouver in 1983, best known for Nathan For You (Comedy Central, 2013–2017), The Rehearsal (HBO, 2022 and 2025) and The Curse (Showtime, 2023), which he co-created with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone co-starred in. His work blends documentary, reality TV and comedy, using real people and absurdly elaborate schemes to explore how awkward, performed and lonely ordinary life can be.
This profile covers his whole career, project by project, with a guide to where to start. For a detailed, episode-by-episode guide to his HBO series, see our companion page on The Rehearsal.
Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto
Fielder grew up in Vancouver, where he did improv at Point Grey Secondary School in the same group as Seth Rogen. He studied business at the University of Victoria, graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce in 2005, a credential he would later turn into a television premise. He then studied in Humber College’s comedy program in Toronto.
His first TV jobs were in Canada: as a writer on Canadian Idol, and then as a field correspondent on the CBC’s satirical news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. His “Nathan on Your Side” segments (2008–2009) cast him as a consumer-affairs reporter who was very bad at confronting people. The awkward pauses, the deadpan, the camera holding on someone’s discomfort: the style was already there.
Los Angeles and the early credits
Moving to Los Angeles, Fielder wrote and directed field pieces for the second season of Important Things with Demetri Martin (2010) on Comedy Central and picked up guest roles in alt-comedy projects such as Jon Benjamin Has a Van, Bob’s Burgers and Drunk History. Those years connected him to the producers and network that would make Nathan For You.
Nathan For You (2013–2017)
Co-created with Michael Koman and produced with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s company Abso Lutely Productions, Nathan For You premiered on Comedy Central in February 2013 and ran four seasons and 32 episodes. Its premise: Fielder, presenting himself as a business graduate with “really good grades,” visits struggling small businesses and proposes marketing ideas so strange that only total sincerity could sell them. Many of the owners go along.
The show was a parody of makeover reality TV, but its real subject was the people: their patience, their loneliness, their willingness to play along with a camera crew. Fielder played a version of himself, a socially lost man more comfortable with a scheme than a conversation, and he leaned into silences longer than anyone else on television.
Essential episodes
- The first episode, in which a frozen-yogurt shop is pitched a disgusting new flavour as a publicity stunt and a pizzeria is offered a delivery guarantee with a ludicrous catch. It establishes the formula instantly.
- Dumb Starbucks (2014): Fielder opened a parody coffee shop in Los Angeles that claimed to be legal as a work of satirical art. It became a real news story before the health department shut it down and Fielder revealed he was behind it.
- “The Movement”: Fielder invents a fitness craze that is secretly unpaid labour for a moving company, and then writes a book to promote it.
- Summit Ice: Fielder sets up an outdoor-clothing brand whose marketing promotes Holocaust awareness, a satire of “ethical” branding. (In 2025 the episode featuring it was removed from Paramount+ worldwide after concerns raised by Paramount’s German division.)
- “Finding Frances” (2017): the feature-length series finale. Fielder helps Bill Heath, a Bill Gates impersonator who appeared in earlier episodes, search for a woman he loved decades ago. It starts as another scheme and becomes a moving film about memory, regret and loneliness. It is the best case for Fielder as an artist rather than a prankster.
Nathan For You won the Writers Guild of America award for comedy/variety series in 2018. Fielder chose to end it after four seasons.
Producer and collaborator (2018–2023)
Between his own shows, Fielder worked on other people’s. He was a consulting producer, writer and co-director on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? (2018). He acted in films including The Disaster Artist (2017), and did voice roles in Rick and Morty and The Simpsons.
In 2019 he signed an overall deal with HBO. Its first fruit was as an executive producer on How To with John Wilson (2020–2023), John Wilson’s three-season documentary series built from obsessive New York street footage and wandering narration. It’s one of the best comedies of the decade, and Fielder’s backing helped get it made.
The Rehearsal (2022, 2025)
The Rehearsal took the Nathan For You method to HBO scale. In season one (2022) Fielder helps people rehearse difficult moments in giant replica sets with hired actors, starting with a trivia-bar confession and moving to a woman rehearsing motherhood in an Oregon farmhouse, before the show turns its gaze on Fielder himself. Season two (2025) tackles airline safety and ends with Fielder, after two years of training, flying a Boeing 737.
Season one won the Independent Spirit Award for best new non-scripted or documentary series, and season two earned Fielder Emmy nominations for directing and writing. Our guide to The Rehearsal goes episode by episode, explains both endings and covers the status of season three, which had not been officially announced as of October 2026.
The Curse (2023–2024)
The Curse, co-created with Benny Safdie and produced with A24, premiered on Showtime and Paramount+ in November 2023 and ran ten episodes into January 2024. Fielder and Emma Stone play Asher and Whitney Siegel, a newly married couple making an HGTV-style home-renovation show about eco-friendly houses in Española, New Mexico. Safdie plays their producer. After Asher performs a small act of stinginess on camera, a young girl places a “curse” on him, and the couple’s carefully performed goodness begins to rot.
It is less a comedy than a slow-motion horror of embarrassment, and many viewers found it too uncomfortable to finish. Others, including many critics, called it one of the most original series of its year, a show about the hypocrisy of performing virtue for an audience. Its final episode is among the strangest things ever made for premium cable. In 2023 Fielder was named to Time’s list of the 100 most influential people, with Stone writing his tribute.
You Can See Everything (2026)
Fielder’s newest project is a feature documentary. You Can See Everything, co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to prison, along with her partner Billy Evans, and was made largely in secret over several years. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2026, runs close to three hours, and A24 scheduled it for release on October 16, 2026. Early reviews called it clever and slippery, a film about how a famously performed public persona holds up under a camera that never looks away, which is a fair description of Fielder’s whole career.
Fielder’s filmography at a glance
| Years | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2008–2009 | This Hour Has 22 Minutes (CBC) | Correspondent, “Nathan on Your Side” |
| 2010 | Important Things with Demetri Martin | Writer, segment director |
| 2013–2017 | Nathan For You (Comedy Central) | Co-creator, writer, director, star |
| 2018 | Who Is America? (Showtime) | Consulting producer, writer, co-director |
| 2020–2023 | How To with John Wilson (HBO) | Executive producer |
| 2022, 2025 | The Rehearsal (HBO) | Creator, director, writer, star |
| 2023–2024 | The Curse (Showtime) | Co-creator, writer, director, star |
| 2026 | You Can See Everything (A24) | Co-director |
Why Fielder matters
Fielder’s work sits in a lineage that runs from Andy Kaufman’s refusal to let audiences know what was real, through the cringe of Tim and Eric, to the self-exposing stand-up of Jerrod Carmichael. What makes it distinctive is the method: he builds elaborate real-world structures and lets the people inside them, himself included, reveal what they really want. That has made him one of the defining comedy voices of the 2010s and 2020s, and a regular subject of arguments about ethics, consent and who comedy is for.
Frequently asked questions
What are Nathan Fielder’s best shows?
Nathan For You (2013–2017) and The Rehearsal (2022, 2025) are his essential work. The Curse (2023), co-created with Benny Safdie, is his most ambitious scripted project, and the Nathan For You finale, Finding Frances, is often called his single best piece.
What is Nathan Fielder’s newest project?
As of October 2026 it is You Can See Everything, a documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2026 and A24 scheduled it for release on October 16, 2026.
Is Nathan Fielder’s business degree real?
Yes. He earned a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Victoria in 2005. Nathan For You builds its premise on that degree, although the persona he plays on screen is an exaggeration.
Is Nathan Fielder really a pilot?
Yes. For season two of The Rehearsal he trained for about two years and earned certification to fly a Boeing 737 in 2025, which the season finale reveals.
Where is Nathan Fielder from?
He was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he did improv at Point Grey Secondary School alongside Seth Rogen. He started his TV career in Canada before moving to Los Angeles.