Nathan Fielder Explains the Real Reason Why He Got His Pilot’s License for ‘The Rehearsal’
The second season of The Rehearsal ended with a twist that came as a big surprise to everyone who didn’t Or maybe he didn’t. Who the hell knows?
But Fielder wasn’t always planning to end the season with the “Miracle Over the Mojave.” During a recent Q&A with Jack Black, the School of Rock star itted that he expected that the season would end with Fielder making his flight safety pitch to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., à la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. “But then you pulled a switcheroo on us,” Black told Fielder, “and the finale episode is actually you’ve learned how to fly a 737. An unbelievable twist I didn’t see coming. No one saw it coming.”
Apparently Fielder would have gone that route had it been a possibility. “If I could get in front of the (Congressional) , I would have done that,” he itted. “And I will still do that if they will have me.” And the series, by design, is never set in stone. “When making a show like this, you have to have a plan, but (also) be open to things that will happen that you’re not expecting,” Fielder noted.
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The main reason why Fielder began flight training two years ago wasn’t because he had an epic climax in mind, it was because he believed that his aviation cred would make it easier to interview pilots. “Right when I had the basic idea (for the season) I was like, ‘Okay, no one is going to take me seriously that I’m trying to investigate this thing or look into it,’” Fielder explained.
He wanted to understand the profession better, but also reasoned that “it’ll help me when I’m talking to these pilots to be like, ‘Hey I’m a pilot too!’”
In fact, Fielder brought up his pilot training multiple times while interviewing the show’s subjects, but the footage ended up on the cutting room floor. “I told them I was a pilot. And then in the edit, we were sort of like, ‘Oh this is more interesting if maybe this is like a reveal in the last episode, rather than having it spread out throughout the season. So part of it was like an edit choice. We hid that more from the viewer.”
“Flying the big plane thing, we didn’t actually know that we could do that for sure until literally like days before it happened,” Fielder continued. “We were still trying to figure it out. You can try to be like, ‘This would be great,’ but also you have to sort of have (alternative ideas).”
This methodology would also also explain why the previous season finale focused on the possibility that the production had messed with the psyche of a small child.
