{"id":944598,"date":"2026-10-24T14:36:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T14:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/944598\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T14:36:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T14:36:17","slug":"how-nathan-fielder-built-his-way-to-you-can-see-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/944598\/","title":{"rendered":"How Nathan Fielder built his way to \u201cYou Can See Everything\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Nathan Fielder has been quietly building his cultish brand of meta-comedy since 2013 and has now exploded into mega-stardom thanks to \u201cYou Can See Everything,\u201d <\/a>the three-hour documentary about now-imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. For those unfamiliar with Fielder\u2019s career or filmmaking approach, his assent to award season hopeful \u2014 even frontrunner \u2014 has felt like welcoming a strange alien to a planet inhabited by the slick Hollywood establishment.\n <\/p>\n

\n If you\u2019re new to Fielder, the film might leave you wondering who is this odd man that Holmes, a convicted fraudster, invited to live in her seaside bungalow with her partner and children in the days before she reported to prison? Is he a serious documentarian? A funny trickster? Both?\n <\/p>\n

\n Fielder\u2019s work, both predating his buzzy feature-length project and the film itself, defies simple description. At its core, his work looks to address a central question: Can you ever really know another person? In his shows and his movies, he combines deep inquiry with awkward comedy, often with himself as a main character. This is his magic trick: Using artifice and absurd scenarios to capture uncanny glimpses of truth, with himself as a prop.\n <\/p>\n

\n Originally from Toronto, Fielder developed his first inklings of niche fame as the host of Comedy Central\u2019s \u201cNathan For You,\u201d a docu-reality series that parodied business consultants and their tactics. The show, which launched in 2013 and ran for four seasons, stars Fielder, using his (real) business degree to help (also real) struggling small businesses. Fielder played up a version of himself on the show, acting as a dumbly ambitious business school graduate, socially inept and desperately seeking connection. His schemes were not so helpful. In one episode<\/a>, he suggested a frozen yogurt shop debut a \u201cpoo\u201d flavor, saying the notoriety would draw customers. In another<\/a>, he placed an ad for a pet store at a pet cemetery.\n <\/p>\n

\"In<\/p>\n

\n The show was critically acclaimed, with the New York Times<\/a> calling it \u201cthe television series with the most incisive take on the 21st-century economy.\u201d Documentary master Errol Morris called the season finale,<\/a> which veered from the business scam format, his \u201cnew favorite love story,\u201d an exploration of our collective \u201cunfettered capacity for credulity\u2014not just the suspension of disbelief but the acceptance of the preposterous.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Fielder followed up \u201cNathan For You\u201d with \u201cThe Rehearsal,\u201d an HBO show that premiered in 2022 and leveraged his obsessive anxious mind and penchant for ultra-realistic simulations. Like \u201cNathan For You,\u201d \u201cThe Rehearsal\u201d used real people \u2014 but instead of small business owners, they were people with a problem to solve and, for different reasons, issues communicating.\n <\/p>\n

\n Fielder constructed elaborate scenarios to allow them to \u201crehearse\u201d for real-life events, practicing each possible outcome so they could be prepared. When one man wanted to prep for an awkward conversation with a friend, Fielder constructed an exact replica of the bar where the feared conversation would take place. Fielder, still dry but less overtly comic than in \u201cNathan For You,\u201d played a laptop-toting social architect, a Machiavellian evil genius whose social anxiety became the engine for esoteric social experiments.\n <\/p>\n

\"112423_Nathan<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re dumb\u2019: Nathan Fielder fires back at FAA over HBO show criticism\n <\/p>\n

\"112423_Nathan<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re dumb\u2019: Nathan Fielder fires back at FAA over HBO show criticism<\/p>\n

2:08<\/p>\n

\n Both shows are at once very silly and surprisingly serious. Saying \u201cNathan For You\u201d is about a business scam or \u201cThe Rehearsal\u201d is about problem-solving is like saying \u201cThe Titanic\u201d is about a boat. Both shows veer into surprisingly philosophical and meta explorations of love, memory, perception, and performance. Most broadly, Fielder\u2019s exploits depict the near-universal struggle for people to understand each other.\n <\/p>\n

\n His persona\u2019s failure to understand social norms shows how arbitrary they are. Fielder often plays the loner, the outsider; his struggle to find romantic love is a common theme in his early work. \u201cYou remind me of the wizard of loneliness,\u201d one subject tells him on \u201cNathan For You\u201d in a surprisingly pointed riposte.\n <\/p>\n

\n Fielder insists his comedic style developed just from being himself. \u201cI noticed that people would laugh at things when the camera was on me that I didn\u2019t intend to be a joke,\u201d he once told<\/a> British documentarian Louis Theroux.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cAt first, it\u2019s humiliating to have people laugh at you when you\u2019re not trying to be funny, but then you\u2019re kind of like, \u2018Oh, I guess these aspects of me are funny,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cObviously, I can write jokes, but the moments I was always trying to chase were those that were inexplicably funny because they were human.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"Fielder<\/p>\n

The fool and the journalist<\/p>\n

\n In his previous work, Fielder honed the surreal approaches he deploys in \u201cYou Can See Everything,\u201d which he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

\n In the new film, as in his previous work, Fielder uses actors to play out real scenarios, and leans on his own dry, bluntly awkward persona to bring out his subjects\u2019 quirks and oddities.\n <\/p>\n

\n But there are differences, too. In his shows, Fielder tends to let things unfold as they may \u2014 he\u2019s not looking to fact check or mock his subjects. \u201cI don\u2019t want anyone to look bad,\u201d he told Theroux. \u201cI want to be the fool.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n In \u201cYou Can See Everything,\u201d however, Fielder steps into the role of quasi-journalist, pushing back on Holmes\u2019 relentless insistence of her innocence and naivete. He still makes jokes, but he mostly lurks in the background of Holmes and Evans\u2019 already surreal post-Theranos-implosion life.\n <\/p>\n

\"Fielder<\/p>\n

\n Oppenheim says Fielder-opposite-Holmes is the comedian at his most authentic. \u201cI feel like this is the closest we\u2019ve ever come to actually seeing Nathan not being a character onscreen or doing a bit,\u201d he told New York Magazine<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Which doesn\u2019t mean you should take him entirely at face value. \u201cAs soon as there\u2019s a camera, it is a performance,\u201d said Sophy Romvari, a filmmaker whose debut feature, \u201cBlue Heron<\/a>\u201d, blends elements of fiction and nonfiction. \u201cIt\u2019s a performance, maybe more of self.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Elizabeth<\/p>\n

Everyone is seeing “You Can See Everything”\n <\/p>\n

\"Elizabeth<\/p>\n

Everyone is seeing “You Can See Everything”<\/p>\n

2:22<\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s true of Holmes, Romvari said, and also of Fielder.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s probably a version of himself, but there\u2019s no such thing as, like, capturing the authenticity of a person without some element of performance,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause you\u2019re aware that you\u2019re being captured, you\u2019re aware that cameras are there, and you\u2019re aware that there\u2019s something to be either gained or lost in doing that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Oppenheim<\/p>\n

\n Which might explain why some have scoffed the film\u2019s designation as a documentary. When a film is presented as a documentary, there\u2019s an expectation \u201cthat you\u2019re just watching a real person and that this is their true self,\u201d said Romvari. But, she said, \u201cA documentary is just a form of filmmaking like any other.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The question, Romvari says, isn\u2019t what\u2019s real, for Fielder or Holmes. The project of filmmaking instead \u2013 whether it\u2019s fiction or documentary \u2013 is to try to capture what\u2019s true: emotionally true for the people we watch.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI don\u2019t really care so much about, \u2018is it real?\u2019\u201d said Romvari.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s not real. But it\u2019s still coming from a place of truth. It\u2019s that person\u2019s truth in that moment.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nathan Fielder has been quietly building his cultish brand of meta-comedy since 2013 and has now exploded into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":944599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-944598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/944599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}