Is The Rehearsal's Kor Skeete A Real Person?

At first glance, Nathan Fielder's "The Rehearsal" seems more like an imaginary scenario you'd stumble across in an Ethics course than a genuine television series – testing you on whether or not it's alright to meddle in somebody else's life for the sake of comedy. The premise is simple enough: the series follows Fielder's attempts to help real people rehearse uncomfortable life events or conversations that they have been dreading – using trained actors and elaborately constructed sets to simulate these nerve-racking scenarios.

On paper, the series certainly sounds comical enough, though things become complicated when you realize that Fielder's absurdly crafted scenarios are actually making a genuine impact on the lives of his subjects. Consider Episode 3, "Gold Digger," wherein Fielder helps a man named Patrick have a full-blown emotional breakthrough via an imagined scenario set in a "Raising Cane's" restaurant. Because of the series' inherent absurdity, it's sometimes hard to believe that these "subjects" are in fact real people and not simply actors playing along with Fielder's wild rehearsals.

Indeed, in the very first episode, Fielder helps a man named Kor Skeete rehearse a confession in which he admits to his friends that he lied about having a master's degree. Later, Fielder turns the tables by practicing a confession of his own with an actor portraying Skeete, whose dramatic reaction blurs the line between reality and performance even more — and might leave some viewers wondering whether Kor Skeete himself is a real person or paid actor.

Fortunately, fans of the series should be happy to hear that Kor Skeete is in fact a real person: an adult education teacher and bar trivia enthusiast from New York City who (according to the Wall Street Journal) had to sign a non-disclosure agreement following his involvement in the series and wasn't even allowed to tell his family about the show until his episode had already aired. For evidence of Skeete's alleged love for trivia (which is a major focal point of the episode), we can look to a 2018 Facebook post showing Skeete winning an Oscar-themed trivia night at a Jersey City bookstore called WORD.

Although the show makes it clear that Kor Skeete is in fact a real person being tormented by his fake master's degree, it's easy to forget that when watching Skeete play along with the absurdly comical scenarios of "The Rehearsal." Indeed, perhaps the most jarring reminder that Skeete is in fact another human being and not simply a test subject comes at the end of the episode, after he has successfully confessed to his trivia partner that he lied about his degree and (as an added bonus) won that night's bar trivia game. The episode reveals that, although the confession was 100% real, Fielder actually taught Skeete all of the answers to this specific trivia night during their rehearsals as a way to boost his confidence and help him focus on the confession.

But Fielder doesn't actually reveal the deception to Skeete onscreen. Instead, he practices the confession with the actor playing him, who (in character as Skeete) reacts with anger and hurt. It's another mind-bending layer to "The Rehearsal," with Fielder essentially putting himself in the same situation that he'd designed for everyone else.

Though Kor Skeete had fame thrust upon him in an entirely unusual way, he subsequently chose to use his brainy know-how to deal with life after "The Rehearsal." As he told The New Yorker, for him, being on the series wasn't about becoming famous. But once the show thrust notoriety upon him, he found himself in a position to do a bit of good, which he accomplished via meet and greets with his newfound fanbase. "I don't want to be haughty about it," he said, "but I feel I've made it safe for people who like trivia but weren't ready to do it publicly."

Not only was he proud to help people feel more comfortable about being trivia nerds, but he also hoped that he might end up back on the game show circuit; after all, he'd auditioned over 50 times to be on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" before ending up on "The Rehearsal." All in all, Skeete remained humble about his newfound fame. "For a little bit of time, I felt like Elvis Presley [...] I lost my cool card because I admit I go to trivia. I guess there's something relatable about me."

To facilitate the connection he has with his fans, Skeete maintains an Instagram and Cameo, and he continues to act as a trivia master. All in all, he's managed to turn the lemons from his time on "The Rehearsal" into lemonade, triumphing against the odds as a brainy hero for the ages.