Note: this article contains spoilers for The Curse’s final episode, “Green Queen.”
Even with the introduction of True Detective: Night Country and Shōgun in recent months, January still gave us TV’s most WTF sequence of the year in the final 30 minutes of The Curse, Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone’s itchy satire of HGTV and white liberalism. For those that haven’t seen it already (you’ve been warned), the season one finale ends with Fielder’s Asher floating off into the atmosphere after randomly waking up on the ceiling of his eco-friendly, passive house one morning. While all of that is happening, his wife, Whitney (Stone), also goes into labor. It’s an unbelievably jarring sequence, one that The A.V. Club’s Saloni Gajjar wrote about still needing time to process a full two weeks after it aired.
She wasn’t the only one. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fielder revealed that Christopher Nolan—the king of practical effects—texted Safdie after watching the episode “and was like, ‘How did you guys do that?’”
Luckily for the Oppenheimer director (and for us), those details aren’t a proprietary trade secret. “You can’t tell that, for a lot of it, Emma is actually on the ceiling, strapped to it,” Fielder explained. While Stone’s character remains bound by the laws of gravity in the narrative, she is lifted up multiple times as she tries to bring her husband back down to Earth. “I’m upside down,” Stone said, adding, “It was the most intense stunts I’ve ever done.”
Fielder continued: “[I]t drags her head back. They were saying she can’t be up there for more than a minute, or she’ll get spine issues.” “[O]ur stunt guy was like, ‘We can’t let Nathan stay up there for more than four minutes because the blood is rushing to his head so much that he’s going to pass out.’ But you were there for seven minutes at a time. You were purple. It was so incredible,” Stone added.
This isn’t the first time Nolan has praised the Showtime series. The director actually moderated a panel featuring Fielder and Safdie back in January, during which he called it “an incredible show” that’s “unlike anything I’ve ever seen on television before.” “There are so few shows that come along that have genuinely no precedence,” he continued. “You’re going back to things like Twin Peaks, or The Prisoner, or Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective and things like that, so you’re in an amazing space, and I can’t wait to catch up with the climax.”
Fielder and Stone’s THR interview also provided some surprising good news (or maybe unwelcome news if you’re still processing all that stress) for fans of the series. There “could be” a second season, the duo revealed, specifying that “right now we’re all doing other things” but “from the start, we had it mapped out beyond the first season.” Will Asher, who presumably died in space, somehow reappear? “I don’t want to spoil it,” Fielder said. It seems unlikely, but if anyone could pull it off, it’s this intrepid team.