Nathan Fielder’s Many Experiments Before You Can See Everything

Plenty of comedians make people laugh. Nathan Fielder prefers to make them question everything they've just witnessed. The Canadian filmmaker, actor and comedian has spent more than a decade blurring the line between reality and performance, usually with an increasingly unreasonable plan.

Born in Vancouver in 1983, Fielder studied business at the University of Victoria before pursuing comedy. As a teenager, he was in the same high-school improv group as Seth Rogen, though their careers would take different directions. After a brief stint at a brokerage firm, Fielder joined the Canadian satirical news programme This Hour Has 22 Minutes, where his awkward interviews and unusual approach to journalism began to attract attention.

His personal biography is almost as peculiar as his television career – his US green card reportedly once listed his sex as female. For someone whose entire career revolves around bureaucratic absurdity and uncomfortable misunderstandings, this feels particularly appropriate.

Nathan for You (2013–2017)

Fielder's breakthrough came with Nathan for You, a Comedy Central series in which he played a business-school graduate who advised struggling entrepreneurs on increasing their profits. The catch? His solutions were usually so ridiculous that they made the original business problem seem perfectly reasonable.

Over four seasons, he suggested everything from selling poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt to opening Dumb Starbucks, a coffee shop that copied Starbucks branding as a parody. The latter became a real-life media sensation, attracting customers unsure whether they were witnessing an elaborate joke or a genius business venture.

Nathan for You's genius was that the people involved were largely real, and Fielder rarely broke character. What began as a parody of business consultancy gradually became an experiment in how far ordinary people would go when confronted with someone who appeared to know what he was doing.

How To with John Wilson (2020–2023)

Fielder took a slightly less visible role as executive producer of How To with John Wilson, an HBO documentary comedy series that follows filmmaker John Wilson around New York City.

Each episode begins with a seemingly ordinary question, such as how to make small talk or cover your furniture, before spiralling into a collection of strange encounters, accidental discoveries and surprisingly emotional stories.

The show shares Fielder's fascination with human behaviour, but with a gentler, more observational tone. Where Fielder often created uncomfortable situations, Wilson simply points his camera at the world and waits for something strange to happen. New York, unsurprisingly, rarely disappoints.

The Rehearsal (2022–present)

The HBO series The Rehearsal follows Fielder as he helps ordinary people prepare for difficult conversations and major life decisions by rehearsing them in meticulously reconstructed environments.

To prepare participants for real-life situations, Fielder recreates entire locations, hires actors to play people in their lives and runs through different scenarios. In the first episode, he builds an exact replica of a Brooklyn bar so that a man can practice confessing to a friend that he lied about having a master's degree.

The series quickly shifts from the participants to Fielder himself. His desire to eliminate uncertainty grows increasingly obsessive, raising questions about manipulation, authenticity and whether human relationships can ever really be rehearsed.

The Curse (2023–2024)

Co-created with Benny Safdie and starring Emma Stone, The Curse marked Fielder's move into fully scripted television.

The series follows Asher and Whitney Siegel, a married couple filming a reality programme about their supposedly sustainable housing developments in New Mexico. Their carefully constructed image as socially conscious property developers begins to unravel when Asher becomes convinced that a young girl has placed a curse on him.

Part satire of reality television, part relationship drama and part psychological nightmare, The Curse examines performative activism, gentrification and the uncomfortable gap between good intentions and actual behaviour.

It also proves Fielder doesn't need unsuspecting members of the public to create unbearable tension. He could simply bring his signature awkwardness to scripted television, making even the most ordinary conversations deeply uncomfortable.

You Can See Everything (2026)

Fielder's latest project might be his most ambitious yet. Co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything follows Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, in the final 34 days before she begins her prison sentence for defrauding investors.

A24 released the documentary in the US on 16 October 2026, with a UK cinema release scheduled for 20 November. Filmed over several years, it was kept largely secret until its surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September. Fielder gained extraordinary access to Holmes and her family, even staying at their home during filming.

The film goes beyond a straightforward portrait of Holmes, exploring how she presents herself on camera and how much of her story you can trust. Given her history with Theranos, she's a particularly interesting subject for Fielder, whose work has long explored deception and how people behave when they're being filmed.

Without giving away the film's more unexpected developments, You Can See Everything asks whether a camera can ever reveal the truth about someone who has spent years controlling how the world sees her.

For Fielder, the project feels like a natural progression. He started by convincing small-business owners to follow absurd marketing strategies, then moved on to reconstructing people's lives, and now he's investigating one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Throughout it all, the central question has remained surprisingly consistent: how much of what we see, and what people tell us, can we actually believe?

And perhaps that's the strangest thing about Nathan Fielder's career. No matter how elaborate his projects become, he always manages to look like the least surprised person in the room.