“The Curse” stunt coordinator Timothy Eulich shares exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and photos explaining how they shot that out-of-this-world finale.
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Emma Stone in ‘The Curse’
Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Curse season finale, “Green Queen.”
In the season finale of Showtime’s The Curse, aspiring HGTV hosts Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) wake up in their Española, N.M., home to discover that something is not right. In fact, it’s very, very wrong. Asher, you see, is stuck to the ceiling — and he can’t get down.
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Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder in ‘The Curse’ finale
What follows is approximately 40 minutes of OMG WTF is happening insanity, as Asher and Whitney struggle against this sudden attack of reverse gravity, trying to get him back on the ground. Even more panic ensues when pregnant Whitney goes into labor and needs to get to the hospital ASAP. Meanwhile, Asher — who eventually makes it outside of the house — has flown up into a tree and is clinging to a branch for dear life. It does not end well for him.
The Curse was created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie (who also plays Whitney and Asher’s producer, Dougie), so viewers likely weren’t expecting a normal ending. But no one could have predicted the (literally) out-of-this-world conclusion Fielder and Safdie crafted for poor Asher Siegel. Fans had plenty of theories about what happened to Asher, but there’s one mystery no one has yet been able to solve: How did The Curse team pull off this sequence?
If your first thought is, “CGI,” you’re not alone — but you’re wrong. The Curse stunt coordinator Timothy Eulich (Everything Everywhere All at Once) says he and his team used “minimal visual effects” during shooting, instead relying on “very simple” practical techniques to create an “illusion of man afflicted by reverse gravity.”
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Not that it was easy, of course. Eulich and his team worked on staging and choreographing the intricate sequences — and the variety of rigging and other equipment needed to execute them — for months. First, they tested out ideas with stunt performers on rudimentary sets built in an airplane hangar in Los Angeles, before moving to The Curse’s actual sets in New Mexico, where stunt performers once again did run-throughs of Asher and Whitney’s misadventures with gravity.
All that preparation made it possible for Stone and Fielder to do almost all the stunts themselves — though, as Eulich explains below, a stunt performer did have to step in when it came time to fling Asher up into that tree. Below, Eulich takes us step-by-step through Whitney and Asher’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad morning — complete with exclusive photos and videos of the stunt teams in action.
The Upside-Down Bedroom
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‘The Curse’ team built an upside-down version of the Siegel’s bedroom for that high-flying finale
The moment Eulich read the script for “Green Queen,” his stunt coordinator mind started racing with ideas. “The low-hanging fruit would be to put Asher on wires and pull him up to the ceiling,” he says. “But it seems to me that audiences are so keyed into these illusions at this point that nobody was going to buy it. So, the idea that I had was we turned the room upside down, and we put Whitney on wires and put Asher on the floor, and pull her up to the ceiling, because our minds are not going to be looking for her on wires.”
In other words, there were two sets for the Siegels’ bedroom: One built right-side up, and one built upside down (see photos) — with the bed, dresser, and every other normally floor-bound object secured to the ceiling. “Katie Byron, the production designer, and her team did such a phenomenal job building that set,” marvels Eulich. “There were so many beautiful details, and I couldn’t tell you how they made the towels hang upside down, but it was so good. I was so impressed.”
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(L-R): Teague Uva, Jared DeWitt, Seth Duhame, Stunt Coordinator Tim Eulich, Matt Davis, Jessica Merideth, Craig Henningsen on the set of ‘The Curse’ finale
Every scene in the bedroom was shot twice, once in the right-side up set with Fielder attached to the ceiling by a wire and harness. “We built a channel in the ceiling so that he could move backwards and forwards. The channel had a pulley, and it was on a skate that would move along that channel. He was harnessed and sucked up into the ceiling, and Emma was lying in bed for that first moment.”
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Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder shoot ‘The Curse’ finale
Hoisting Fielder to the ceiling worked for some shots, but it didn’t allow him to move around on the ceiling, as the script required. “I wanted Nathan to be able to have a weird range of movement that would be impossible to do if we kept him harnessed into the ceiling,” says Eulich. That’s where the upside-down set comes in — with Fielder lying on the “ceiling” (actually the floor), and Stone strung up on wires.
The Towel Sequence
The understandably confused and terrified Whitney and Asher try several different ways to get him unstuck from the ceiling. When opening up the door to change the pressure in their eco-friendly house doesn’t work, Asher suggests that Whitney throw him a towel and try to pull him down. Getting that shot — and the shots of Whitney bracing against the floor trying to yank Asher from the ceiling — was a multi-step process.
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Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in ‘The Curse’ finale
“For the purposes of gravity, we had to have Nathan up on the ceiling so that that towel would hang naturally,” explains Eulich, who says that shot was filmed on the right-side up set. “As soon as Emma grabs a hold of the towel and starts pulling him, we cut to the upside-down set, and she is hanging upside down. It looks like she’s standing on the floor and they’re keeping the towel taut.”
As shown in the rehearsal video above, Eulich’s team created a system to hoist stunt performer Jessica Merideth from the ceiling of the upside-down set, so it looks like she’s standing at the foot of the bed. “On my count, the stunt riggers would pull her up in the ceiling to make it look like she’s pulling down, and then let her down,” says Eulich.
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Just as every detail in the bedroom had to be recreated for the upside-down set, the actors themselves had to be dressed and styled in ways that wouldn’t give anything away. “There was a tremendous amount of effort going into saving the illusion in terms of how we were going to have her hair,” explains Eulich. “It couldn’t be loose, otherwise it would be hanging upside down. What kind of pajamas both of them were going to be wearing — if something’s too baggy, it’s going to hang down and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the illusion. From a very early point, these discussions were happening. There was a lot of communication, collaboration between hair and makeup and costumes and production design.”
The “Human Orb” Sequence
After giving up on the towel, Whitney climbs on to the bed and attempts to pull Asher down using her entire bodyweight — and for a brief, horrifying moment, they both find themselves suspended in mid-air.
“We called that the human orb,” jokes Eulich. “That one was particularly complicated. We had two actors on two different sets with four different harness configurations, six different stunt rigs, just to get those 30 to 45 seconds of on-screen time.”
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Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in ‘The Curse’
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The rehearsal video above, with Meredith and her fellow stunt performer Craig Henningsen in the upside-down set, reveals a glimpse of the elaborate set-up. “When we’re in the upside-down set, Whitney is in a harness, and he is hanging upside down. We also have Asher in a harness for that so that we can hold him up so she’s not holding his weight,” says Eulich. “Then on my count, they would fall apart. The stunt riggers would pull Whitney up into the bed into a seated position, and [they would] just release Asher, so he would fall with gravity down to the ceiling/floor.”
The Vacuum Sequence
When the towel and the “orb” move don’t work, Asher has another idea: “Grab the Dyson from the closet!” He wants Whitney to hoist the vacuum high enough so he can grab it, suction up his phone from the nightstand, and call for help. As with the previous sequence, Stone and Fielder shot part of this in the right-side up set, with Fielder attached to the ceiling and Stone crawling freely on the floor.
In the rehearsal video above, Merideth and Henningsen do a run-through of the vacuum moment in the upside-down set. “She’s harnessed and attached to the ceiling, and then we have the vacuum attached to the ceiling as well,” says Eulich. “So that vacuum, my team would lower it down so that it looked like she’s lifting it up, and then pull the vacuum back up to the ceiling quickly to make it look like it’s too heavy to lift.”
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Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in ‘The Curse’
If all of this doesn’t sound complicated enough, The Curse team also had to work against the clock any time Fielder or Stone was hanging in a harness for a shot. “I tested a lot of Nathan’s workout for the research and development period, and I got so sick from hanging upside down for long periods of time, just terrible headaches and nausea,” recalls Eulich. After much trial and error, he determined that the actors and stunt performers would need a break from reverse gravity every 90 seconds.
“We would get everything set, roll cameras, everything’s ready, cameras are rolling, and then we would bring them up into position,” says Eulich. “And as soon as they were up in position, I had a person who would start the timer, and at 90 seconds they would cue me on the radio and whatever was happening, we cut and bring them down and give them a moment to rest.” Though Fielder often “wanted to keep going,” Eulich insisted on the frequent breaks: “It was challenging to get all of that in 90-second increments.”
The Outdoor Sequence
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Dr. Elliot Berlin, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on the set of ‘The Curse’ finale
With Whitney’s contractions getting more intense, Asher manages to scoot himself along the ceiling of the house and out to the portico by the front door. Finally, help arrives, in the form of Whitney and Asher’s doctor, Moses (Dr. Elliot Berlin). But when he pulls Asher out from under the overhang, the force of reverse gravity is so strong, Moses loses his grip — and Asher hurtles up into a tree.
“I have to give a big shout-out to my stunt rigging team,” says Eulich. “They came up with some of the most impressive and complex rigging solutions to some of these problems that we had.” In addition to two gradall machines, The Curse crew also had an 80-foot crane that helped lift Fielder — and later, his stunt double, Henningsen — high into the air when it was time for Asher to fly into the tree.
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Nathan Fielder in ‘The Curse’ finale
“We used multiple trees for this,” adds Eulich. “At the house, that branch that we use is like 65 feet off the ground, and it was very challenging to get a human onto that branch. So, we had the stunt double on that branch. When you see Nathan in the tree, there was another tree that we found three minutes away from that location in a big empty parking lot. The branch was about 20 feet off of the ground, and it matched the high one. We still had our crane out there and all our machines, and we had Nathan in a harness to hold him up there. I was orchestrating my rigging team to pull him up a little bit so that you could see a little gap between his body and the tree, and then he would have to fight to pull himself back down.”
In the end, not even the fire department could save Asher from his high-flying fate. While fans were left to wonder what Fielder and Safdie were trying to say with “Green Queen,” Eulich sees a different kind of meaning in the end result. “The thing that was really exciting about this for me was that it’s different,” he says. “Everybody that I hired to be a part of this, that was part of my pitch. ‘Listen, we fly superheroes around all the time. How many different ways can you do that? This is an opportunity to create cinematic art.'”
