About 15 minutes after the New York Film Festival premiere The curseI felt the large audience of the Alice Tully Hall shifting en masse in their seats. One of the series’ stars – and co-creator and writer – Nathan Fielder, had just done something quite disarming, and the atmosphere changed collectively and palpably.
Fielder is a popular comedic actor who, based on the proliferation of Warby Parker glasses and baseball caps around me (I say in jest), most of my audience was there specifically to see. A question that was probably on the minds of many of these fans (including myself, as a long-time fan) is the extent to which Fielder would debut as a Big Serious Actor in his first narrative show, or whether he would be the partially real one. , a partially degraded version of Nathan Fielder that we had all come to know and love from the comedy reality shows that had made him famous – the Fielder persona that he himself couldn’t seem to let go of. It’s exactly why the scene that noticeably stirred my audience did so in the first place: Fielder was suddenly a character we didn’t quite recognize.
Nathan Fielder has refined playing a certain type of man, one who also happens to look a bit like him who he actually is. By means of Nathan for you, he became infamous for his signature on-screen personality style of rigid, restrictive discomfort. With his clumsy, monotone cadence and slightly creepy way of interacting with others, he repeatedly put himself at odds with the non-actors in his show by simply letting awkward moments play out to excruciating effect. He brought that personality back for his more artistic reality venture, The rehearsal, last year, which served partly as a commentary on his documentary style, his own image, and the murky ethics of both. But Fielder is now practically inseparable from this carefully nurtured brand of cringe, which he sees in very few small acting roles outside of his own shows to prove if he can stretch from it, or even if he really wants to.
Photo: Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount Plus with Showtime
With his new Showtime series, The curse, which he created, wrote for and stars in with Benny Safdie, Fielder amplifies and satirizes his own infamous personality to sublime effect. The entire character of Asher Siegel subverts the Fielder archetype while still heavily playing into it. In The curse, Fielder’s familiar awkwardness is transformed into a version I’ve dubbed Dark Nathan. Fielder, the other half of a married couple vying for HGTV fame as they gentrify a poor New Mexico town, plays Asher Siegel, husband of Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone).
As Asher, Fielder is clumsy, meek and subservient to his wife, whose dominance and submission over him is perhaps most intimately expressed in a great sex scene in the first episode and the earlier revelation that he has a small penis. Asher’s small dick issues have manifested as an inferiority complex, while Whitney has settled into a god complex of sorts. But the two find common ground in the fact that they are morally meaningless con artists who deeply believe in their own scams, desperately want to be liked and, most importantly, be seen as good with a capital G.
The scene that rocked my NYFF audience was one at the beginning of episode 1, where Asher and Whitney are interviewed on camera about their upcoming show. Fliplanthropy, by a reporter who plans to grill Whitney about her corrupt family ties. When the couple’s attempts to deflect the conversation fail, Asher, wanting to defend his wife, confronts the reporter viciously and personally. Fielder has spent the episode so far as the version of himself that people recognize: vocal bluster, stunted speech, hesitations and pregnant pauses. A man who is ‘just kind of there’, ‘very unpleasant’ and ‘not interesting’, as the focus group members put it Fliplanthropy astutely point out in Episode 3, a scene that feels like a kind of metatextual aside on Fielder’s well-known personality. But when Asher goes into attack mode, Fielder speaks smoothly, clearly and with a confidence that seems not only unrecognizable, but also deeply treacherous. Just before his attack, he spoke about his wife’s “Passive House” project by mechanically reading a script from memory, laughing awkwardly and trying to assimilate as a human being as Fielder always seems to be. With our guard down and our expectations tempered, he sneaks in with a performance that makes it clear he won’t be quite the same man this time.
It could easily come across as if Fielder is purely trying to give himself intense acting moments that prove his range – and maybe a little bit of that is. But it’s also a big part of what defines Asher’s character: a consistent repression of emotion that explodes in bursts of powerful anger. Guided by his wife’s whims and relationship with his own cock, he keeps his feelings to himself and has no healthy outlet to express them until they’re released in a flood (in particular, he puts on such a show of howling at the end of episode 9, which is almost hard to watch).
But Asher is not as clumsy and subdued as the Fielder Nathan for youor even The rehearsal, the latter of which has a more artistic/satirical intent, with Fielder still using that familiar unhappiness to make a specific point. In The curseThere is a certain calculation in his social inelegance, as if his subconscious intention is to disarm the people he interacts with, just as Fielder has disarmed us, the viewers. Asher is not entirely innocent, even though it’s clear that he embodies a subservience to Whitney that manifests in protective rage and pathetic, masculine deference.
The weaponization of his clumsiness gives him a certain benefit of the doubt, as when a hilarious and premeditated snafu with a former colleague allows him to steal the incriminating footage he needs for a bribe. Where Nathan for you saw Fielder’s strange personality used to create comedy by pushing the boundaries of painful social interactions, Asher pushes the boundaries of moral turpitude by how much he can get away with by “just being there.” It doesn’t always feel intentional, but there’s a noxious quality to it nonetheless, as well as a clearer self-awareness, especially when it comes to his relationship with Whitney. Asher’s invisibility and submission, unlike his wife, creates a perverse sub-dom dynamic between the two of them. It also allows for a level of overall responsibility that he can willfully avoid – see a later scene where Asher says he is Whitney’s baby and does an impression of a baby for her and her gynecologist.
So this is Dark Nathan: Fielder’s character, subverted as a kind of passive antagonist, outwardly unassuming, who has no real loyalty to anyone or anything other than what his current situation calls for. He is ultimately morally empty, which is what makes the character so evil; Whitney, equally immoral, hides her own rotten conscience beneath the facade of forced sympathy and open-mindedness. But because Asher plays it more like he doesn’t know any better, he quietly comes off as the worse of the two. Depending on which direction you want to look Nathan for you And The rehearsalmaybe Dark Nathan has been the only Nathan all along – at the very least, The curse proves that he is eager to explore the darkness he has created for himself.
The curse episode 1 is now streaming on Showtime. New episodes premiere every Friday.