Who is Nathan Fielder? The Canadian filmmaker behind new Elizabeth Homes documentary

Nathan Fielder’s new documentary, You Can See Everything, landed in cinemas on Oct. 16, bringing in US$15 million in its opening weekend and marking the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in North America in more than 20 years.

The Canadian-American comedian and filmmaker had already risen to fame with his TV shows including The Rehearsal and Nathan for You, but the Oscar buzz around You Can See Everything combined with the film’s near-perfect scores on review platforms like Letterboxd and Metacritic has launched Fielder to a new level of fame.

Here’s what we know about his life and career.

Nathan Fielder is a 43-year-old comedian, actor, writer, and filmmaker, known for his awkward, deadpan delivery and TV projects that blur the lines between reality and performance.

He was born in Vancouver and attended Point Grey Secondary School, where he was part of the school’s improv group alongside fellow student and actor-comedian Seth Rogen.

As a teen, Fielder worked as a magician in Vancouver, at a store and at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. In a recent interview with W Magazine, Fielder said: “I was doing magic, and I worked at a magic shop from when I was 13 until I was 20. I had to stop, because if you don’t stop, people will forever say to you, ‘Show me a trick.’”

In 2005, he graduated with a degree in business from the University of Victoria “with really good grades” — a tagline for one of his TV shows years later.

In 2008, Fielder made his first appearance on CBC’s news parody show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, where he had a recurring segment called “Nathan on Your Side” in which he played a consumer advocate.

The role helped him land writing roles at Comedy Central in the U.S., where he worked on the sketch-variety series Important Things with Demetri Martin.

Fielder became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2025, according to reports.

In 2013, Fielder launched his own Comedy Central series, Nathan for You, a docu-reality show in which he offered struggling businesses outlandish advice, drawing on his real business degree.

In one episode, he suggested a frozen yogurt shop add a “poo” flavour; in another, he placed an ad for a pet store at a pet cemetery; and elsewhere he had a hotel test a soundproof “sex box” by placing a child inside to shield them from a porn shoot staged in the same room.

The show further established Fielder’s socially awkward and absurd style that has become his signature.

Nathan for You ran for four seasons, earning a near-perfect 97 per cent score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with the New York Times hailing it “the television series with the most incisive take on the 21st-century economy” in a 2015 review.

The show won three awards at the 2014 Canadian Comedy Awards and in 2019 won a Writers Guild of America Award in the Comedy/Variety Sketch Series category.

In 2022, Fielder launched his show, The Rehearsal, in which he constructed scenarios allowing real people to rehearse real-life events.

One of Fielder’s most notable moments came in the second season of The Rehearsal, where he learned to pilot a Boeing 737 and hired actors to play passengers as he flew over the Mojave Desert. He also recreated the life of hero pilot Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger by being “birthed” as Sully and breastfed from an oversized puppet.

The Rehearsal received four Emmy Award nominations and is in the “Universal Acclaim” category on Metacritic, with Screen Rant calling season two “daring, profound, and subversively hilarious.”

Fielder also starred in and directed Showtime series The Curse, a black comedy in which he and Emma Stone portray a couple trying to bring their vision for eco-conscious housing to life and produce a TV show called “Flipanthropy.”

Fielder’s inspiration for the show was a real-life incident that happened to him when he had just moved from Canada to L.A., according to co-creator Benny Safdie. A woman approached him and asked for money, and when he apologized for not having any cash, she said, “I curse you.” He went to an ATM, took out $20 and returned to ask if the curse was lifted, to which the woman said yes.

Fielder has also held small parts in the 2017 comedy-drama The Disaster Artist, which also starred Seth Rogen, and HBO’s mockumentary Tour de Pharmacy, among others. He co-directed the Sacha Baron Cohen satirical series Who Is America?, which aired in 2018.

You Can See Everything is a three-hour documentary which follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the days before her prison sentence begins. Fielder co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim.

Holmes was convicted of four federal charges of wire fraud in 2022 for misrepresenting to investors what the Theranos technology was capable of and how widely its machines were being adopted. Theranos falsely claimed it could perform a range of medical tests using a small amount of blood from a single finger prick. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in federal prison in November 2022.

In You Can See Everything, Holmes grants Fielder and Oppenheim extraordinary access to her life with partner Billy Evans and their two children. For the film, Fielder lived with Holmes in her seaside rental for 34 days.

Of the small team of roughly seven on-site crew members, several also hail from Canada, including editor Adam Locke-Norton and Ottawa-born producer Tatiana Bears.

You Can See Everything is the latest in a string of pop culture projects based on Holmes, which includes HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and Hulu’s The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.

On Thursday, Fielder and Oppenheim surprised viewers at a Toronto film screening of You Can See Everything. Oppenheim praised Canada’s filmmakers at the screening, calling them some of the “best on the planet.”

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