With Oppenheimer’s box office dominance and critical acclaim, Christopher Nolan is finding himself in a monumental moment, which he got to celebrate on Thursday when he was given the Best Director prize by the New York Film Critics Circle. However, while accepting the prize, he kept things humble by sharing a funny anecdote about the time he was on his Peloton watching a class when the instructor called out one of his films, saying “That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back.” Following his comments going viral, the instructor has shared a message in response.
Jenn Sherman is an instructor on Peloton who hails from New Jersey and was, in fact, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s story. The internet even found the exact moment from the class on Twitter where Sherman asks “Anybody see this shit?” after a song from Tenet comes up on her playlist. She then quipped “because I need a manual” and said the comments Nolan loosely paraphrased. Here’s how Sherman replied:
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. I was excited, and then I read the article. Listen, it was 2020. It was a dark time. I’m up 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? Yeah, that would only happen to me.
In Nolan’s speech, the director shared he was “dying” on his Peloton taking part in the class that he was streaming on a TV screen. (Yes, the filmmaker does watch those). Randomly, Jenn Sherman started insulting the movie in the midst of his exercise.
Christopher Nolan shared the story as an example that “film criticism is being democratized” with opinions “everywhere.” Here’s how Sherman continued to respond:
So, here’s what I want to say. I may not have understood a minute of what was going on in Tenet – that shit went right over my head, but I have seen Oppenheimer twice and that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back. So Mr. Nolan, I’m inviting you to come take a ride with me at Peloton studio, you can critique my class, we’ll have a great time, you’ll sit in the front row and I promise you it’ll be insult free. Let me know. Take me up on it.
While Sherman stands by her thoughts on Tenet, and to her credit, that’s one of the more confusing one’s from the filmmaker, she gave Christopher Nolan some major credit when it came to Oppenheimer. She shared that she’s seen one of the biggest 2023 movie releases not only once, but twice, and she is happy she spent six hours with the film.
She also invited Nolan to one of her classes, saying he can “critique” it all he wants and she’ll keep it “insult free.” Check out the video:
How To Watch Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk And Other Christopher Nolan Movies Online
We didn’t have it on our bingo card for 2024 that Christopher Nolan and a Peloton instructor would go viral in the same sentence, but if you did, congrats on being psychic and also knocking that one out in the first week of the year.
If you’re a fan of Nolan’s Oppenheimer (or would like to be), the movie is coming back to theaters in 70mm IMAX on January 12. It’s one of CinemaBlend’s best movies of 2023, and now it's been given the thumbs up by a Peloton instructor who wasn’t high on Tenet.
