Robbin Stone—the horny, Scion tC-crashing, sign-seeing, and Christ-loving sort-of paramour on the latest episode of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show—felt like his appearance didn’t show him in the best light.
Stone, who has a moving company in the Portland, Oregon area, said that if there’s something he’d like viewers of The Rehearsal to know, it’s that he doesn’t smoke weed anymore. In fact, he is completely sober. He also doesn’t think what people saw of him in The Rehearsal—an absurd social experiment moonlighting as a reality show in which Fielder meticulously rehearses anxiety-inducing moments in people’s lives—actually showed the kind of person he is.
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“I think they really, like, changed my personality,” Stone told Motherboard over the phone. “The portrayal is just completely aimed at making me look bad.”
Getting on the show, for Stone, was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Stone said that he was approached by a man named David while he was going down to Sellwood Riverfront Beach in Portland, Oregon.
“He started asking me about current events, and how I felt bringing a kid up in this environment and different stuff,” he said. “I was just answering him, and he liked it, and he sent me to the next person for an interview, and they set me up for the date.”
(Motherboard reached out to Nathan Fielder through his management, which declined to comment.)
The date was with Angela, a woman who is considering having a child and was rehearsing for that by taking care of child actors and a robot baby in a three-month simulation of parenting into which she at one point invited Stone. (It’s a bizarre show.)
Some basic facts about Stone are, he says, accurately portrayed in the episode. Stone says that he is a strong believer in Christ—a belief that has only grown with the multiple vehicular accidents he’s gotten into. On top of crashing his Scion tC at 100 mph, something he repeatedly references in the show, he also had a brush with death when he was involved in an ATV accident.
“I even saw the white light,” he said. “I was ascending, going to heaven. And God pulled me out.”
In the case of his Scion tC, he said that the circumstances of the crash actually began the day before. He and his then-girlfriend were trying to quit alcohol, but he found out that she was still drinking.
“So basically, I said I was going to continue drinking too, and being a lesser version of myself, because that’s exactly what she was doing,” he said. “I ended up going to the liquor store early in the morning that day.”
Stone said he began drinking early that morning, believing that he wasn’t going to be working that day. He was unexpectedly called in, and Stone said that the client began antagonizing him for laughing too much with his co-worker. After having a “heart to heart” with this co-worker where they smoked weed and drank gin, Stone was let go from the job. Stone said that because the client was saying he would call the police, he panicked, because he said that he had a warrant out for his arrest at the time. (Police in Beaverton, Oregon declined to comment.)
“So I ended up just trying to go back to the house where I’m at with my girlfriend, in northeast Portland, and I’m driving pretty good most of the time,” he said. “Then I get on highway 26 approaching the zoo, and somebody was trying to gas on me.”
Stone, who said he likes street racing, took them up on the chase.
“So I started to race him, weaving between lanes and all that because there were a lot of cars on the road, it was a pretty prime time of day” he said. “I end up losing control at 100, going back and forth trying to correct as I’m fishtailing, then just completely lose it and smack into the sidewalk.”
Although he was under the influence of alcohol and marijuana and was also street racing at the time of the crash, he believes the true culprit was the faulty mechanics of the car itself.
“In retrospect, I had gotten a new Scion tC and I was trying to sell the one that I’d crashed,” he said. “But I had an alternator problem with the other one and didn’t get it fixed. And I completely forgot that my front right tie rod was bad, which controls steering.”
Stone said that there were things he’d said during his time on the show that he wished had gotten more airtime.
“I know I talked a lot more about Jesus than what they showed,” he said. “Like mine and Angela’s conversation at the MacGyver Park, we were bouncing off each other, really sharing a lot of similarities with Christ.”
Stone said that he and Angela still talk.
“We feel that we’re meant to be together,” he said, though he noted that there were complications keeping them from being together.
Probably the funniest thing Stone did on the show was leave in the middle of the night, claiming he needed a good rest, on his first night as Angela’s simulated co-parent. Stone said that the crew of The Rehearsal gave him the impression that the robotic baby’s cries wouldn’t be as loud or as frequent as they ended up being in the show.
“The way that he described it was, it was going to be connected to a real baby,” he said. “So whatever the real baby did, the robot baby would do.”
As viewers of The Rehearsal know, Fielder asked for loud baby cries frequently through the night for comedic effect. But Stone feels like his treatment during his time on the show, as well as his portrayal after the fact, was fueled by a personal vendetta from Fielder himself, whom he described as invasive and provoking. He said he’d gotten a weird vibe about the project from the start.
“When I went out to the farmhouse, like, I was just wondering how legit it was, if I was about to be murdered for my faith or something,” he said.
He said that he felt tension between himself and Fielder when he got into a fight with his roommate, saying that he was “literally about to beat his ass.”
“He probably didn’t want people to see that,” he said.
All in all, Stone is frustrated that The Rehearsal cut his appearance down to only the “douchey” things he said and did. But he isn’t sure that he would have done or said anything differently. Even his comment to Fielder about wanting to sleep with Angela even though she is celibate, which he acknowledged came across as crass, was something he could justify.
“I could just tell. I mean, I’m very good with women,” he said. “I could just tell she was into me like that. So that’s why I even said that.”
