The New Fan’s Guide to the Unreal World of Nathan Fielder

There has been no shortage of coverage on Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley fraudster whose biotech startup Theranos reached a peak valuation of $9 billion in 2014 before its supposedly groundbreaking blood test machine was revealed to be vaporware. Books, magazine articles, documentaries, TV dramatizations—the exposés have piled up high.

So, you might ask yourself, why the hype for the forthcoming You Can See Everything, yet another documentary about Holmes, and one that spans three hours?

The excitement is thanks to Nathan Fielder, one of the film’s directors. (Fielder codirected the documentary with Lance Oppenheim). Fielder is a cult-favorite television auteur whose devotees have awaited his showdown with Holmes ever since rumors about him visiting her in prison surfaced last year.

Now that Fielder appears poised to break the containment of an obsessed fan base and conquer the cineplex, it behooves you to get caught up. This will not be a typical documentary: Fielder has made a career of heightened unreality, sowing confusion wherever he goes. To give you some notion of what to expect from his analysis of Holmes, here’s a rundown of his unusual and captivating style.

Business Bona Fides

One reason Fielder makes sense as an interlocutor for big tech’s most notorious con woman is his own history of corporate chicanery. In his breakout TV series Nathan for You (2013–2017), he contrived and implemented bizarre publicity stunts for struggling small businesses. (While he jokes that he “graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades,” the fact remains he did graduate, unlike Holmes, a Stanford University dropout.)

Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and academic coordinator for the research project Democratic Literacy and Humour, writes in an email that it’s important to recognize that, throughout his career, Fielder has always played the same altered version of himself, leaving us unsure just who he really is.

Fielder “has made the borderlands of persona and person so ambiguous, so indeterminable, so indefinable, that none of us is entirely in on the joke,” Bricker says.

Nathan for You and Fielder’s subsequent HBO series The Rehearsal, Bricker explains, cast him as “a kind of outlandish problem-solver, someone possessed of what I sometimes call the engineer’s brain, which sees the world strictly through the radically simplified framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves, ouroboros-style, always lead to new problems.”

Indeed, in his fixer role on Nathan for You, Fielder seeks out overcomplicated loopholes and goes to great lengths to carry out any particular scheme once he sets his mind to it. To help an international exporter avoid high shipping costs on smoke alarms, for example, he comes up with a plan to market them as musical instruments. Then he creates an instructional DVD on how to play one, forms a band that records an original track that includes the device’s shrill beeping, and gets the song featured on the local news, all to legitimize the tariff dodge.

Fielder’s Nathan for You promotions involved careful readings of pertinent laws in order to skirt liability—he went viral by opening a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks—as well as clever hoaxes and media manipulation. He staged a video of a pig saving a goat from drowning in a pond at a petting zoo, successfully tricking social media users and news stations into thinking it was real, and founded Summit Ice, a nonprofit winter apparel brand that stands against Holocaust denial, which earned it mainstream exposure.

Holmes, of course, played investors and the press for years with savvy PR, styling herself as the next coming of Steve Jobs in order to hype a bogus advance in medical science. If there’s anyone who can grasp the scope and scale of duplicity it took to make the world believe in a nonexistent product, it’s Fielder.

Awkward, Maybe Neurodivergent … and Mean?

Early in his career, Fielder tackled the business world with a recurring spot on the satirical CBC Television news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. His segment, “Nathan on Your Side,” was a send-up of local consumer advocacy investigations and an early showcase for Fielder’s deadpan humor, as seen in a 2008 report where he role-plays as a customer at an electronics store and invites a salesman to pitch him on an MP3 player but continually dismisses these efforts because he is “just browsing.”

Throughout Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, Fielder has relied on this discomfiting affect to maximize the awkwardness of his conversations with everyone he encounters. Although polite and unassuming—many of his fellow Canadians relate—he lets heavy silences linger, maintains uncomfortable eye contact, and never quite breaks, no matter how funny a situation may be. Fielder also has a knack for flatly echoing what someone else has told him in a way that underscores its absurdity.

With these tics, Bricker says, Fielder often catches his interview subjects off guard, spurring them to blurt out surprising confessions.

Holmes is an ideal target for this poker-faced approach. Kate Rennebohm, a professor of film at Lawrence University, has written about the ethics and artifice of HBO’s The Rehearsal, which follows Fielder as he constructs elaborate simulations of pivotal life events in order to better understand human behavior. Rennebohm writes in an email that Holmes the fraudster represents something like an ultimate test of Fielder’s methods.

Holmes is, according to Rennebohm, “a woman whose infamy rests solely on her apparent ability to totally disregard reality.” For this reason, Rennebohm expects Fielder’s skills as a performer and instigator “will get perhaps their most strenuous exercise yet in this match.”

Bricker says that “we are about to witness a bizarro-land Frost/Nixon, where both interviewer and subject have almost exclusively inhabited semi-fictional personae in public”—Fielder as a mad social scientist, Holmes as an inventor ahead of her time.

But while Holmes may be deserving of invasive scrutiny, some critics are unable to stomach how Fielder incorporates unwitting, ordinary people into his satirical plots, occasionally allowing them to look somewhat foolish or flustered while he remains unflappable. Just as your appetite for “cringe” comedy will determine whether you laugh at the scenarios Fielder orchestrates, the shows have turned into litmus tests on questions of conscience and empathy. Does he take advantage of the working-class folks and background performers drawn into his elaborate web of control, or is he merely reflecting a dysfunctional society back to us?

This tension, along with Fielder’s preoccupations and overall demeanor, have occasioned plenty of speculation around whether he has ever been diagnosed with a mental condition. The Rehearsal has led to viewers theorizing that Fielder is on the autism spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. Fielder acknowledged this discourse in the second season of the show and underwent an fMRI brain scan that could have pointed toward such a diagnosis, though he did not divulge the results.

Others have thrown the word “sociopath” around when discussing Fielder’s work, but not always in a negative sense. As one X user recently noted in a post anticipating You Can See Everything: “Nathan Fielder doing a movie about how Elizabeth Holmes is a deceptive sociopath feels exactly like when Dexter takes down a worse serial killer.”

Unpredictable Anthropology

Even starting from the simplest premise, Fielder ventures into strange territory. In a Nathan for You episode in which he counsels a realtor to employ a psychic medium to ensure that the homes she’s selling aren’t haunted, she drops the bombshell that she was once choked by a ghost in Switzerland. In another, Fielder has a gas station owner advertise impossibly cheap prices, attainable only through a hilariously inconvenient rebate process. Yet the memorable part of the segment is when the business owner reveals that he drinks his grandson’s urine when he feels scared.

Fielder often follows up on peculiar discoveries, allowing people’s eccentricities and the unintended consequences of his own meddling to dictate where he goes next. As such, there’s an investigative element to his process that is certainly appropriate when dealing with an enigma like Holmes, a convicted criminal who continues to proclaim her innocence with a cheery warmth that comes off like utter self-delusion.

In 2023, Fielder and Oppenheim, the codirectors of You Can See Everything, moved into the Del Mar, California, house shared by Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans. The group lived together in the house for over a month, right up until the day Holmes reported to prison for her 11-year sentence. They weren’t sure if what they were shooting could be turned into a movie, but as Fielder said at the New York Film Festival last month, a sense of deepening mystery compelled them to move forward.

“Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on … what we thought was happening,” he explained. “And we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting, if we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’”

Fielder has “a remarkable talent” for using those frictions to twist and expand his narrative, Rennebohm says. She cites The Rehearsal's second season, which is inspired by Fielder’s theory about how the breakdown in communication between airline pilots and copilots can lead to deadly accidents. In order to act out his model of cockpit cooperation, he spends two years earning a commercial license for himself, ultimately flying a Boeing 737 full of actors (all of whom have scripted roles to perform while aboard) from San Bernardino, California, to the Nevada border and back.

When it comes to Fielder following a thread as far as he can, Rennebohm says, “I expect this document of his time with Holmes to be no different.”

The Search for Reality

What has emerged in Fielder’s most recent output might be described as anxiety over the nature of truth.

The Rehearsal (2022–present) is, on its face, a setup to explore the way we conduct ourselves under destabilizing circumstances. In the first season, Fielder concocts a scene where a man can practice confessing to his bar trivia team that he lied about having a master’s degree. For the rest of the season, Fielder is consumed by an elaborate, multi-episode experiment in which a woman evaluates what life would be like as a mother, aided by child actors (and Fielder serving as her platonic coparent).

Yet there are countless moments when Fielder is more concerned with the authenticity of these staged interactions—and their ongoing failure to fully match reality—than their potential outcomes. The actual subject of the show, we learn, is his fanatical mode of observation.

Fielder is often shown walking around with a laptop attached to his torso with a harness so he can take notes on the move. He catches the smallest inaccuracies and oversights, and he tweaks the next reproduction accordingly. He intuits the psychological dissonance of pretending to do something instead of really doing it, and he has frank interviews with his cast and consultants in hopes of closing those gaps.

The Rehearsal, according to Rennebohm, “offers the fictionalized Nathan the chance to substitute manufactured, seemingly controllable realities for the reality of his actual life, though often even these fabricated scenarios ultimately resist Nathan's totalitarian drives.”

Bricker points out that the fundamental “paradox” of Fielder’s “supposed revelations of truth” is that he only arrives at his conclusions through his constructed persona and meticulous simulations. “Even if these are true moments of authentic self-disclosure, how would we even know, given the artificial framework of their disclosure?” he asks.

But that, too, makes You Can See Everything a fascinating proposition. Bricker notes that Fielder and Oppenheim are in a position to play with the “mushy boundaries between reality and fiction” through dramatic reconstruction, stylization, and careful editing.

Rennebohm says that Holmes also serves as an avatar of a tech industry with ambitions of exceeding or dispensing human reality itself. In this and so many other ways, a face-off between Fielder and the disgraced startup founder is the collision of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. All you can do is brace for impact.