Nathan Fielder has been pretty quiet lately. Maybe a little too quiet.
After Season Two of The Rehearsal wrapped up, we heard quite a lot from Fielder. He appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, attended Q&As and even popped by CNN’s The Situation Room to excoriate the FAA for ignoring his aviation safety advice.
Although Fielder may not be releasing new material any time soon, some of his fans have found one recent news story to be suspiciously Fielder-esque.
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It was reported that Pittsburgh International Airport is seeking volunteers to help ensure that their new terminal is 100 percent ready to open. How? By participating in an massive “dress rehearsal.” Yup, apparently the airport is asking three to four thousand people to show up and “act as regular passengers,” frequenting shops and even collecting luggage. Some of the volunteer actors will even be given scripts to inform their behavior.
An elaborate simulation featuring a staggering number of actors playing everyday characters?
This entire stunt feels as though it was pulled directly from The Rehearsal. And the core mission of the airport’s rehearsal is basically the central premise of Fielder’s show: ensuring the best possible outcome by using simulated run-throughs to workshop real-life experiences. On top of all that, it’s all happening in an airport, which ties into the recent season’s aviation theme.
So it’s really no surprise that a number of people immediately thought that the guy who just built his own fake airport terminal might be behind this endeavor.
“Oh my god what if the entire airport renovation was actually a part of The Rehearsal Season 3 all along,” one user of Pittsburgh’s subreddit posted. “This is the first thing I thought when I saw this,” another agreed. “I’m ready to volunteer as Passenger All-Ears during this rehearsal,” a Fielder fan joked.
On The Rehearsal’s subreddit, fans similarly questioned whether or not the Nathan for You star had something to do with this plan.
Sadly, Fielder is almost certainly not involved with the day-to-day operations of the Pittsburgh airport. In fact, it’s not unprecedented for airports to have full-scale dress rehearsals prior to big openings. In a 2020 piece about Berlin Brandenburg International Airport’s renovation, Atlas Obscura noted that “airport dress rehearsals are an increasingly common practice” because any “glitches can make international headlines.” And just last summer, Portland International Airport staged two dress rehearsals, paying thousands of participants $50 Visa gift cards each to pretend to be travelers.
So this is hardly a new phenomenon, it’s just that people are seeing things in a different light in today’s post-Miracle Over the Mojave world.
