Nathan Fielder is reflecting on his time loving Emma Stone on screen — and clarifying that he felt absolutely nothing for her.
In Sunday’s episode of The Rehearsal, “Kissme,” the Nathan for You comedian explores the relational boundaries and emotions of actors as they perform love scenes while in-character as fictional people.
Fielder becomes puzzled by a comment made by one of the show’s numerous actresses (who’s preparing to play another one of the Rehearsal actresses, Emma, in an attempt to simulate her blossoming romance with an airline pilot named Colin… it’s a long story).
“When I’m approaching a love scene — obviously I know it’s not real real, but it was real for a minute, you know what I mean?” the actress tells Fielder.
John P. Johnson/HBO
Nathan Fielder on ‘The Rehearsal’ season 2
“It’s real for you when you’re doing it?” Fielder asks.
“Yeah, it’s happening while it’s happening,” the actress responds.
“But it’s not real real,” Fielder tries to clarify.
“Yeah, like the emotions feel real,” the actress confirms. “It feels like I’m like, ‘Oh, I really, I feel this way about this person right now.'”
Fielder then jumps into voiceover narration to discuss his own experience acting on The Curse, in which he and Stone played a recently married couple who struggle to create a reality show about their property development company.
“This was confusing to me,” Fielder narrates in reaction to the actress’ claim about feeling real love during her performances. “I recently acted in a dramatic series that aired on Paramount+, a network with some questionable viewpoints.” (For more on the comedian’s feud with Paramount+, read EW’s recap of his criticism of the streamer here.)
Fielder goes on to explain that he felt no genuine emotion while performing on The Curse. “In the show, I had to act as a husband who was deeply in love with his wife,” he says, as footage of himself and Stone is shown in montage. “But even though I was mimicking the expressions of a man in love, inside my head, I didn’t feel that at all for the actress playing my wife.”
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Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder at ‘The Curse’ season finale premiere in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Jan. 8, 2024
The comedian continues, “I was basically just copying the expressions of other people in love that I had seen on TV and movies. So I didn’t understand how an actor can be feeling real love in a completely fake relationship.”
Fielder previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he was “intimidated” to build a convincing on-screen couple with Stone on The Curse. “It wasn’t so much my acting as just really making sure that people could buy into that relationship and be like, ‘I can understand how this couple got to this place and what they might see in each other, or why they might need each other,'” he said. “You could look at them and be like, ‘Why are they together?’ But also you start to see, ‘Oh, they also couldn’t exist apart.'”
Later in the episode, Fielder invites the actors’ real-life significant others to The Rehearsal set to observe their partners performing love scenes, and is surprised when all of them seem relatively unfazed by watching their partners in such an intimate context.
John P. Johnson/HBO
Nathan Fielder on ‘The Rehearsal’
“I was realizing there’s this magical thing that happens when people say that they’re acting,” Fielder explains via narration. “It was like the concept of acting itself disarmed everyone in its presence, and the actor gets a free pass for virtually any behavior.”
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Fielder then successfully manipulates Colin into kissing Emma by staging a fake date in a soundstage recreation of Colin’s real apartment and telling Colin he’s playing “Captain Powers,” an airline pilot whose superpower is “every date he goes on, he has no problem asking for a kiss and then doing it.” Fielder leaves the scene up to improvisation, and Colin eventually works up the courage to kiss Emma (playing “Jennifer Kissme”).
Fielder suggests that Colin only had the courage to kiss Emma because of the acting “loophole” that allows people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t in real life, and implies that he’ll apply this principle to solve the season’s overarching problem: miscommunication between airplane copilots leading to aviation accidents.
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a rep for Stone to ask about her own experience acting opposite the comedian.
The Rehearsal airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO and Max.
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