Warning: This post contains spoilers for the wild ending for The Curse. Tread lightly if need be.
The Curse came to a close the other week, and the way it ended suggests there probably won’t be a second season. Unless there could be! After all, The White Lotus was supposed to be a one-off limited series, and look at it now. If you’ve seen the show, created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, you understand why the conclusion was divisive. Even those who loved it were surely left scratching their heads. But was what happened to Fielder’s Asher always the way it was supposed to go? The answer is: Yes.
“From the beginning, this was always the ending,” revealed Safdie, who’s also one of the show’s stars, during a screening of its 10th episode at Lincoln Center.
When asked how he “reverse engineered” the show from that capper, Safdie said, “Well, originally, he floats away but very slowly and then, practically speaking, we’re like ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be more exciting if it was reverse gravity and so then it was literally like falling off a cliff upwards.”
Safdie refused to explain what it all means, which is for the best, but he did get into his inspiration for chasing this crazed ending:
I know there are a lot of questions about why it happened, and I imagine, why him? We have reasons, but it is very early in the gestation of all this, so the way I’d like to leave it is like, if you have a drawer, for example, and there was no handle on the drawer, how would you open it? Would you tip it forward, so that the drawer falls out? Would you use a knife to get into the crack and open it? Maybe you’ll take some tape and stick it to the front and pull it out that way. You’d come up with a lot of different ways to open that drawer, and what you’d find is the same information, but the way you got the information was your own. If you put a handle on the drawer, you just open it right up and find your information, so you lose a little bit of that process and that kind of searching, which I think is important for this.
I do think there is something strange in that. You will be watching something and asking, why did this happen? Why did this thing, which is clearly supernatural—why did this happen? How could it happen? It had to have been this, it had to have been that. You’re trying to find reasons for it, so it’s not too dissimilar to what it would be like if you were actually there. That was something that was important to us, which is when you’re faced with something like that, how would you respond?
[…]
I think in the process of trying to understand it, you understand more.
On The Curse, Safdie plays curly-haired Dougie Schechter, an HGTV producer making a home improvement show with married couple Whitney and Asher Siegel, played by Emma Stone and Fielder. In the maiden episode Asher, in an attempt to make himself look more charitable than he is, offers a $100 bill to a young girl, only to ask for it back after they get the shot. She then puts a curse on the show. And that’s only the beginning.
The Curse now streams on Showtime, which one can watch on places like Paramount+.
(Via The AV Club)
