Nathan Fielder and Tom Cruise: A tale of two heroes

Fielder is right. “Prank” is an inaccurate description of what he does. Fielder’s medium is the stunt, whether he’s rebranding a “Dumb Starbucks” and faking a viral pig rescue in Nathan For You, dressing like some ’90s bohemian on late night, or quietly taking lessons for years so he can literally fly a passenger aircraft for his HBO series. The version of him we’re privy to is very intense, sometimes off-putting, and willing to take the bit far past the point of comfort and past perhaps its natural, logical end. He is nothing if not committed to the art of the stunt. The greater the freedom, be it artistic or financial, the closer we get to understanding the real guy’s mind.  

This, bizarrely, is a description that could also fit Tom Cruise. The fact that Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning opened the same weekend that The Rehearsal ended is coincidental, but watching them back to back, a twisted parallel emerges. Cruise conducts himself similarly intensely. He is everywhere but supremely unknowable in any real way. And the Mission: Impossible franchise is his baby. Cruise has produced every movie in the series, and, along with director Christopher McQuarrie, decides what plays out onscreen. It’s at least partially his decision to hang from a flying, upside-down biplane, or parachute from a motorcycle driven over a cliff, or climb the Burj Khalifa.  

Onscreen, it’s Ethan Hunt doing these things—half of Cruise’s film roles in the past decade have been this character—but that rarely registers. Over nearly 30 years and eight movies, it feels more like Tom Cruise has become the main character of these films. And as ridiculous as the movies’ plots can be, the stunt work approaches documentary-level realness. (This is thanks in no small part to the mini-docs released about some of the films’ stunts.) None of us actually know him, but seeing him hang from the wing of a biplane, wind blowing his hair into a helmet and the skin on his face into a tight mask, makes us go, “Oh my god, that’s Tom Cruise.” It’s both “I can’t believe that’s Tom Cruise doing that” and “That’s who Tom Cruise is.” 

Cruise is the guy with near-infinite resources who uses them to build movies around elaborate stunts. Nathan Fielder is a guy with a lot of resources who uses them to fill a TV show with elaborate stunts. They do this for our entertainment but also because these are things they fundamentally want to do. Fielder is as slippery as ever, but this season of The Rehearsal offered more of him than we’ve seen before, with speculation about his neurotype, the revenge he enacted against his once-and-maybe-future employer, and his decision to spend a blank check from HBO on a pseudo-documentary culminating in him flying an empty commercial jet across the Atlantic…just because he likes the solitude.