Benny Safdie Isn’t Trying to Make You Uncomfortable With ‘The Curse’

Within weeks of its release, viewers of Showtime’s “The Curse” have been swallowed up by the atmosphere of discomfort crafted by cocreators and stars Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder — an impact Safdie said is not the “intended feeling” of the series.

“We’re not out there to make people feel uncomfortable,” Safdie told TheWrap. “We’re just trying to make the best thing that best shows these people, and best expresses their emotions and their ideas, for better or worse … and if the byproduct of that is somebody feeling like that, that’s not the intended feeling.”

While fans of Fielder’s “Nathan for You” or “The Rehearsal” might have been primed for cringe comedy in the comedian’s first dramatic role, Safdie’s rendition of Dougie, a reality TV producer with some haunting secrets of his own, prompted some visceral reactions of discomfort from viewers as well. After several failed projects — including a particularly distasteful reality dating show centered on a burn victim — Dougie is hell-bent on getting a series order for “Flipanthropy,” an HGTV show featuring married couple Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Fielder), even if it means spotlighting moments of conflict Whitney is desperate to shove under the rug.

“We treated the show [and] the people in it as if they were real in a lot of ways, and that meant we had to cross-check everything. As you would go through one character doing this, how would it affect this person? How would it affect that? How does this person feel?” Safdie said. “We really were trying to create as rich of a place as possible.”

Perhaps the premise of “The Curse” is enough to make viewers feel unsettled. The drama series spotlights the cracks in Whitney and Asher’s facade of integrity as they fund high-end businesses that seem out of place in the highly indigenous community of Española, New Mexico. The couple attempts to repair the lives of those displaced by the neighborhood’s gentrification — which is partly ushered in by Whitney’s lavish eco-friendly mirrored homes.

Whitney and Asher’s performative charity shines through within moments of the first episode, as Dougie places water on the face of a cancer patient to simulate tears when the couple delivers the news on-camera that her son has been offered a full-time position at a new coffee shop.

“Maybe it’s people sitting in moments where they can’t avoid feeling an emotion — maybe that’s what it is,” Safdie said. “But I feel like I like that. I like when I am in a theater or watching a show and I can’t help but feel the emotions of the people on the screen, whether I want to or not.”

“The Curse,” which drops new episodes every Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime, was originally inspired by Fielder’s real-life experience of getting cursed by a woman he borrowed change from to get a new phone in Los Angeles. While Fielder returned the cash to her and subsequently had the curse lifted, Safdie and Fielder took the hypothetical of what would happen had he not been successful in paying her back — providing the framework for the curse placed on Fielder’s Asher after he snatched back a $100 bill from a little girl in the first episode.

With the framework of “The Curse” decided, the duo centered their attention on an HGTV couple as the center of the series, given both Fielder’s background in reality TV and Safdie’s obsession at the time with shows like “House Hunters” or “Fixer Upper.” He described the “hypnotic” experience of watching nothing but the home improvement network while attending prenatal doctors’ visits with his wife in 2016, two years before they wrote the pilot.

“There was a behind-the-scenes making of ‘Fixer Upper’ that I remember seeing and Joanna Gaines was … giving her talk to camera, but then it cut to the outside camera and she had all of her kids next to her just out of frame,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a really weird thing for the kids to see.’ You start piecing together what their lives are … [and] you start seeing these kind of overcompensations within the people in the show, and I realized there’s something really fun to do there.”

Developing an HGTV show like “Flipanthropy” was not too far off base from the real-life easements and issues facing communities like Española, which Safdie and Fielder familiarized themselves with by reading the New Mexico town’s hyperlocal news.

“There was one time [on HGTV] where they said, ‘if you don’t like your neighborhood change it,’ and I was like, ‘Huh, what does that mean? What are they trying to say here?’” he said. “You’re watching all these shows, and you’re seeing something go on that’s a little bit strange, and it’s kind of unfair that this is also the ideal for something — they’re going into these neighborhoods and changing the neighborhoods and making everything more expensive, and it’s all so positive and so happy.”

While the show touches on lofty topics like gentrification, appropriation and white savior narratives, Safdie noted he and Fielder didn’t enter the series “trying to make a big point about these things,” but instead aimed to uncover the complexities surrounding these issues.

“As soon as you put a label on something, it’s so easily understood, so we tried not to do that. We tried look at everything almost with a scientific eye and just [try to] understand it,” Safdie said. “I think by picking a place like Española, New Mexico, there’s so many different people there, that inevitably, these problems and these issues, if you’re open to it, will become a part of the show. That was key for us — all we wanted was to explore everything.”

Safdie and Fielder welcomed the feedback from community members as they shot the series in New Mexico, particularly leaning on the perspective of indigenous artists and the challenges they face as they crafted the role of Cara (Nizhonniya Austin), a local artist whose friendly relationship with Whitney is used by the couple as leverage to connect with indigenous leaders.

“The last thing that we would want is for it to feel untrue to somebody,” he said. “We were trying to inhabit a lot of different points of view.”

“The Curse” is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

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