Not since Mr. Big’s death, then brief resurrection, by Peloton has the fitness company made such waves in Hollywood. While accepting the best-director award for Oppenheimer at the 2024 New York Film Critics Circle dinner on Wednesday night, filmmaker Christopher Nolan remembered a critical cycling workout he completed with Peloton.
“I was on my Peloton doing some high-interval gasping, some shit,” he recalled. “The instructor started talking about one of my films, saying, ‘That’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.’” After eliciting laughter from the crowd, Nolan expressed gratitude for the diligence of actual film critics. “When Rex Reed takes a shit on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out more with him,” he joked.
After Nolan’s headline-making anecdote began to circulate, the internet soon unearthed the footage he had seen. It shows Peloton instructor Jenn Sherman leading a workout to the soundtrack of Travis Scott’s song “The Plan,” which was written for Tenet. “What the fuck was going on in that movie?,” Sherman says. “Seriously, you need to be a neuroscientist to understand. And that’s two-and-a-half hours of my life I want back. I want it back.”
She wasn’t alone in her critique. Nolan’s high-concept, coronavirus-era blockbuster starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh, and Elizabeth Debicki, which was released during the height of Peloton’s popularity, was labeled “confusing” by many. That includes VF’s own Richard Lawson, who in his review of the film called the film’s script a “mess,” writing, “It’s still really hard to understand what the hell is going on, and all the head-scratching starts to hurt pretty quickly.”
Four years later, Sherman offered an explanation for her assessment on Instagram. “Huge day for me, when I come to find out that the one and only Christopher Nolan, one of the leading filmmakers of the 21st century, knows who the hell I am,” she began in a reel posted to Instagram. “Listen: It was 2020. It was a dark time. I’m on the platform, teaching my little class, and I’m running my mouth off like I’m known to do. And I make a random comment about a movie I had seen the night before. What do you think the odds are that the director of said movie would take that ride some four years later? That would only happen to me.”
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Despite her niceties, Sherman maintained her stance on Nolan’s 2020 movie. “I may not have understood a minute of what was going on in Tenet. That shit went right over my head,” she said. But she has far more appreciation for the most recent entry in Nolan’s filmography. “I have seen Oppenheimer twice,” she added. “And that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back.”
Sherman then extended an invite to her next cycling session. “Mr. Nolan, I’m inviting you to come for a ride with me in the Peloton studio. You can critique my class,” she continued. “You’ll have a great time. You’ll sit in the front row. And I promise you it’ll be insult-free.”
