I notice Nate Bargatze’s car before I notice him.

The burnt orange Porsche has just pulled up to the bustling Nashville restaurant where we’ve agreed to meet, and the valet is signaling for Bargatze to park out front. Once he’s made his way inside, he’ll tell me that his primo spot is a perk of driving a stick shift — what he won’t say, and what he’d hate having to read here, is that it’s also a perk of being the most successful touring comedian in the world.

As Bargatze, 46, has climbed to the top of that comedy food chain — slowly at first, then lightning fast — he’s wrestled with many things, none more so than: How does a guy who’s parlayed his everyman persona into a burgeoning empire remain an everyman? After all, an everyman doesn’t sell out arenas; he doesn’t star in movies; he doesn’t host Saturday Night Live; he doesn’t get tapped to emcee this year’s Emmy Awards; and he certainly doesn’t have a burnt orange Porsche parked out front.

Truth is, Bargatze loves the car. He spends so much time on tour, it’s nice having something he looks forward to driving when he’s home. And frankly, at this stage, he could afford a whole fleet of them without noticing a dent in his bank account. But there’s also a genuine discomfort that comes with the spoils of success. “I’m embarrassed,” he says as a few restaurant-goers do double takes. “I hesitate to even talk about it because I don’t want anybody to think that I think I’m better than them.”

Bargatze has spent a fair share of his time lately grappling with concerns like this one in therapy, which is another thing that he’s embarrassed about. He’s terrified he’ll come off as some out-of-touch elitist and not the comfortably relatable, oafish dad that’s earned him his legions of fans. But he has just come from his therapist’s office, and he had a good session, maybe even a breakthrough, and once he starts talking about it, he can’t seem to stop.

You have to understand this is all relatively new territory for Bargatze, who was raised “upper lower class” in Old Hickory, Tennessee, where nobody spoke about shrinks, much less saw one. “Where I come from, the only reason you’d go to therapy is if you, like, set your house on fire,” he says, “not because you’re, like, managing life.” But who else is he supposed to talk to about this stuff? These aren’t exactly everyman problems.

***

In Bargatze’s high school yearbook, students were asked what they thought they’d be doing with their lives in 10 years. His response? Performing at Zanies, the preeminent comedy club in his native Nashville. On its face, it’s an obvious answer for the funny kid in class — it also reveals an ambition that he’s always had but has only recently been comfortable discussing. “I think it used to feel stupid for me to want to dream this big,” he says.

Ask the same question of Bargatze today, and he’ll look you in the eyes and tell you that he’s trying to build “the next Disney” — a destination for the kind of wholesome content that he grew up on and wishes were still available to enjoy with his wife, Laura, and their 13-year-old daughter. A decade from now, Nateland, as he’s named his company, should have TV shows, movies, podcasts, specials, live events and, yes, even an amusement park. He laughs off the notion that it may be too late for mass-appeal entertainment in an era of niche. “Every weekend, I look out [at packed arenas] and I see that it’s OK to be for everybody,” says the comic, whose family-friendly act grossed more than $80 million last year, outselling everybody in the business, including Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld and Sebastian Maniscalco combined.

Still, he regrets how he articulated his vision for Nateland and, more notably, its competition in a springtime interview with Esquire, telling the magazine: “Now Disney is run by a guy that’s just a businessman [and] doesn’t care about the audience.” It wasn’t exactly what Bargatze meant, and when he saw his comments making headlines, he was frustrated, mostly with himself.

“That was me dumbly not knowing and just saying something,” he tells me. “But when I said it, I was also kind of seeing, like, does what I say have weight? And it turns out it does.” According to Bargatze, it led to him texting directly with Disney CEO Bob Iger, which was, admittedly, wild. It was Bargatze who fired off the first text: “I don’t know how to do interviews.” The two are hoping to cross paths Emmy weekend.

Now that he has the industry’s attention, Bargatze wants to meet everybody. “All the people who came before me,” he says, “and just learn from them.” He already peppered Adam Sandler, a role model, with questions at the SNL50, and he picked Mark Wahlberg’s brain on the golf course. He’s also sat, spongelike, with top executives like Peter Rice and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and he keeps an encouraging voice note from Seinfeld, an idol turned mentor, saved on his phone. Bargatze may make jokes about his “big dumb eyes” — the name of his current tour and his best-selling book — but the college dropout is ferociously competitive and now deeply committed to building a behemoth.

“Nate’s got that ‘aw, shucks’ thing to him, but he’s taking it all in,” says Felix Verdigets, a friend and neighbor who recently left his partner role at the prestigious consulting firm KPMG to be the CEO of Bargatze’s company. “I love being in business meetings where people start to get like, ‘Hey, buddy, are you with us?’ Like, ‘You following us?’ And then he’ll just turn around and ask the smartest questions, and everyone will go, ‘Oh.’ ”

But in order for him to get to the next level, Bargatze says he’s got to do some real work on himself, which is where the therapist comes in. For about a year now, he has been carrying around ADHD meds. A doctor prescribed them because Bargatze has many of the symptoms — “I can be hyper-focused on things like comedy, but then everything else feels overwhelming,” he says — and he had every intention of taking them. Then he got scared. “So scared,” he tells me. “Because what if ADHD is my superpower?”

There’s also a part of Bargatze, one that he isn’t particularly proud of, that worries that this very conversation makes him weak. “Like I should be able to just grow up and handle it,” he says. At the same time, what if the meds could quiet his brain? What if they could even help him get a handle on his diet and start committing to being fit and healthy once and for all? These are things he wants, and as the demands of him and his time continue to grow, things he needs.

Fans of Bargatze’s stand-up and his Nateland podcast know all about his affinity for chain restaurants — he famously met his wife working at Applebee’s — and for fast food. “I have a major problem. Last night, I even drove myself to get a Sonic Blast because I was overwhelmed and I don’t know where to send that energy except to that,” he says. “Then I look at myself and I go, ‘Why am I going? I don’t even want it.’ But I don’t know what else to do. Drinking is gone. I was able to address that. So, what’s my outlet now?”

Bargatze cut booze back in 2018, just as he was making the transition from comedy clubs to theaters. He feared if he didn’t, it would sabotage his career. But his relationship with food has proved trickier to wrestle control of. In fact, he says he started taking the weight-loss drug Mounjaro earlier this year, right before production began on The Breadwinner, his first feature, because he felt himself spiraling — but he hates how the shot makes him feel and he hates the fact that he needs it.

If he does end up taking the ADHD meds — which, on this evening, is still a big if — he’ll want to figure out a way to get off of them as quickly as he can. “It would just be to give myself a break,” he says, as he forks into a butter pecan doughnut that he’s ordered for dessert. “It’s almost like I’m drowning, and I need a raft to hold on to, just to let me get my bearings, and then I need to try to swim again.”

***

Bargatze used to worry that he would never make it in the comedy business because he didn’t have a troubled childhood to mine. Instead, as he wrote in his best-seller, his upbringing was “pure dumb funny.”

His father, Stephen, was a clown, then a magician, which would yield loads of material as he grew older (including a 2012 special, Yelled at by a Clown); as a kid, it just meant the Bargatze house was full of silly props and Nate and his two younger siblings had reliable birthday party entertainment. Any time he was given a chance to join his father onstage, he’d jump at it, though he never engaged in the magic. Even now, he says, “I only know how to ruin a trick.” (These days, Stephen opens for his son on the road, where he regularly kills; in a matter of weeks, the nearly 70-year-old will tape his first special, which Nateland is producing.)

It was his father’s faith, however, that did more to shape Bargatze. Stephen and his wife, Carol, raised the family Southern Baptist, which, their son has joked, meant that “Jesus had more fun than [he] did.” It definitely limited what Bargatze was allowed to watch, and the language that he uses to this day. His friends all say they’ve never heard him curse, on- or offstage. He remembers doing so once, in an early special, and he’s still mad about it. He’d called his dad for permission at the time, explaining how the tag he’d be using — “don’t be a bitch about it” — was the only way he could think to secure a laugh. “I regret it so much,” he says now. “I just wasn’t a good enough comic to figure out something else.”

Bargatze still makes a habit of going to church when he’s home, and prayer is his answer to many things. At one point, he tells me, “As a Christian, I feel very much called in what I do,” then stops himself. In his desire to be broadly relatable, Bargatze has learned to minimize his faith publicly. It’s easier to sell out arenas on both coasts and everywhere in between when you’re not potentially alienating anyone. It’s one of the reasons he’s always chafed at the “Christian comic” label, a box inside which he never wanted to be placed.

The clean label, on the other hand, Bargatze wears like a badge of pride — though in an ideal world, he’d rather you not notice that he never touches anything remotely controversial. That’s arguably easier to accomplish these days, when Bargatze and his openers all subscribe to the same PG philosophy. It was significantly harder to pull off early on, when he was coming up in New York City clubs, doing the uncensored midnight shows with jokes about parking and his magician dad. (It’s worth noting here that he’s never been fazed by what others do; the vast majority of Bargatze’s comedian friends and role models are considerably filthier and often political and it doesn’t stop him from hanging out or guesting on their shows. He’s done them all: Joe Rogan’s, Theo Von’s, Marc Maron’s and John Mulaney’s.)

His commitment to staying clean has always impressed Jimmy Fallon, who once headlined his own Clean Cut Comedy Tour before taking over The Tonight Show, and recruited Bargatze to join him. “He could go dirty if he wanted to, but he’s like, ‘I’m going to choose not to,’ and it’s harder to make the choice not to and be successful,” says the late night host, who’s had Bargatze on his show more than a dozen times and later recommended him to Lorne Michaels to host SNL.

Still, it was a slog. For years, Bargatze watched as the careers of his edgier peers took off. “We all knew how good he was, but the bookers took a little longer,” recalls fellow comic Julian McCullough, who came up with Bargatze in New York and now emcees his tour. “You sort of always knew it was going to be a longer road for him because he wasn’t a noisy, flashy guy and he wasn’t going to change to fit tastes — he was just going to keep writing better jokes than everybody else, and that’s what he did.”

In Bargatze’s estimation, his career was always moving forward, just never as quickly as he wanted it to or felt it should. In fact, even after he scored a Grammy nomination for his 2021 Netflix hour, The Greatest Average American, Netflix is said to have encouraged him to explore other distributors for his next special. Amazon bit immediately, and though Netflix ultimately came around with a bigger offer, he took the Prime Video deal. He was hurt, but not particularly surprised. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing well,” he says, “but everybody started getting a little opinionated, and it was like, ‘Man, they’re getting all this industry love’ and they’re ‘the coolest thing.’ And when I’d get offstage, people would be like, ‘Oh, he’s the funniest,’ but I wasn’t getting any of that and it was really frustrating.”

Bargatze had an even harder time in Hollywood. He spent a decade pitching a series of loosely autobiographical sitcoms without anything to show for it. He even managed to enlist big-name producers, who were genuine fans of his comedy. One had Fallon attached; another had Jerrod Carmichael and Drew Goddard. It was never enough. Bargatze was selling something that L.A. executives weren’t buying.

Then everything changed.

***

In Bargatze’s career, there is a “before Saturday Night Live” and an after. Michaels gave him his first shot as host in October 2023, when the rest of Hollywood was off on strike. And though he was filling arenas by then, there were plenty still googling, “Who is Nate Bargatze?” He took it in stride.

“I’d just sold out the Oklahoma City Thunder arena that week, but I didn’t go in, like, ‘You should know who I am,’ because why should they?” he says now. “I knew that that was a different audience, and that I had to murder.”

By all accounts, he did. Bargatze’s monologue, nearly 10 minutes of his best material delivered in his laconic, deadpan way, earned widespread raves; and his “Washington’s Dream” sketch, which mocked America’s asinine system of weights and measurement with him as George Washington, quickly went viral. The episode delivered the show’s highest ratings in nearly a year and catapulted Bargatze into the zeitgeist in a way he’d never experienced before. “It couldn’t have gone better,” says Fallon, who’s agreed to open for his buddy at Madison Square Garden later this month and is now back in comedy clubs for the first time in years. As for Bargatze, he was invited back to SNL the following season.

From there, Bargatze’s touring business exploded — “I was doing arenas before, but I joke that SNL added the second arena,” he says — and so did his ambitions. He hired Verdigets, and the two built out a staff of about 15 full-time employees. They already have a talent incubation system in place to identify and grow other clean comics, along with plans to build a sweeping production facility in Nashville and offer Nateland “experiences,” which include a 2026 voyage with Norwegian Cruise Line and that amusement park. The latter is moving along nicely, says Bargatze — they’ve completed a market study and are about to start the feasibility one. If everything continues to go well, they’ll have a shovel in the ground in five to six years. To pull it all off, he’s been meeting with Tennessee legislators and potential investors.

“I’ve been with Nate long enough that when he starts talking about a theme park, I know he isn’t joking. I’m like, ‘Yes, let’s do a theme park,’ ” says McCullough. “I also know that not everybody’s going to hear it that way, and they haven’t.” But as Bargatze and everyone in his circle will tell you, naysayers are his fuel. “Tell him no and he just winks at you, like, ‘All right, I’ll show you,’ ” says Verdigets, who claims his partner’s competitive side is omnipresent: “Everything’s a game with him. You go over to the house, and he has you in the Trackman [golf simulator] seeing who can hit the target first, or you’re in the pool seeing who can hold their breath the longest.”

In recent months, the Hollywood end of Nateland’s business has been moving at warp speed. If you believe his reps, it’s because Bargatze’s poised to revive the once vital family-friendly comedy — think Home Alone or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids — and he knows how to sell tickets. That he’s never actually acted in a movie, much less opened one, doesn’t seem to faze them. “Everybody recognizes that he’s this unicorn in the world right now,” says Jason Heyman, a UTA partner who works closely with Bargatze. “He can tap into the left and the right and everyone between the coasts in a way that no one else is, and he’s doing it in a very wholesome, nonthreatening, family-first way.”

For Nicole Brown, president of Sony’s TriStar Pictures, Bargatze was worth betting on. In fact, she couldn’t get the Mr. Mom-esque comedy that he co-wrote, produces and stars in into production fast enough. “The idea of his first film being so personal and authentic to him and his comedy felt like the perfect foray, and he’d really identified a space,” she says of The Breadwinner, where Bargatze plays a bumbling dad. “He was like, ‘I want to be able to watch a film with my whole family. We can go watch animation now, but there’s nothing with real people in it.’ ” Plus, he intends to promote The Breadwinner with a preshow teaser video in every arena he plays from now until its March theatrical release. That there was also a stunning number of brands, from Walmart to Toyota, that wanted to be affiliated with the film was, as Brown puts it, “an amazing surprise.”

Verdigets, who calls Bargatze “a corporate dream,” squeaky-clean without being saccharine or cheesy, was considerably less surprised. “Look, Sony’s great, they’re awesome, but these companies didn’t wake up one morning and go, ‘Let’s do something with Sony today,’ ” he says. “They went, ‘Oh, we finally can get with Nate,’ because he typically doesn’t endorse as Nate Bargatze but he can endorse as Nate Wilcox, his character in The Breadwinner.”

By Verdigets’ count, there are at least nine more scripts, three animated projects and two game shows in various stages of development at Nateland — and that doesn’t account for the deluge of IP coming Bargatze’s way. (“Every classic comedy that studios have in their cellar,” says Heyman.) Given his schedule, he’s already abandoned his own sitcom dreams, though he hopes to produce them for other comics. Bargatze will stick to movies, animation and game shows. At press time, his reps were hammering out a deal with ABC for the latter, which he’s hoping to film at the Grand Ole Opry, as he did his CBS holiday variety special last year. CBS is hoping he’ll do more of those, too, but first they’ve got him hosting the Emmy Awards.

“At a time when so much comedy is polarizing — half the country loves it, half the country hates it — you have this genius in Nate, who’s just trying to bring us all together,” says CBS CEO George Cheeks, a longtime Bargatze fan. “He’s not preachy, he’s not didactic, he’s just human — and to me, there’s nothing more refreshing.”

Others might tell you that hosting an awards show is a thankless gig, but Bargatze doesn’t seem fussed. He chuckles at the idea of having to watch all of the nominated shows, and he has no plans to cancel his Denver tour dates on Friday and Saturday of Emmy weekend. A week and a half before the Emmys, he calls me, not from a writers room in L.A. but rather from a golf trip in Pinehurst, North Carolina. “Don’t worry, I’m getting jokes sent to me,” he says. (He also says that he’s just started taking those ADHD meds that he’d been carrying around, and it’s been “nice to get some relief.”)

As Bargatze sees it, the Emmys don’t actually require a ton of stage time from the host, and he makes his living on a stage. Plus, he has an A-list team with him that includes head writer Mike Gibbons, who wrote for both Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes and The Roast of Tom Brady. Still, the fact that a guy who spent 10 years trying and failing to get a television series of his own on the air is now hosting the TV industry’s biggest night is not lost on Bargatze. “And there’s probably a little bit of me that wants to feel like I belong,” he says. “I know that I sound different and I live in Nashville and I do these other things, but I want to be accepted by them. I think they’re cool, and I want them to think I’m cool, too. I want all of it.”

And he’s about to go all in.

***

Bargatze’s plan is to do one more tour after the one he’s currently on, and that’s it. He’ll turn his attention to Hollywood. “I know how much focus and hard work it is to get where I got with stand-up, so if I want to do that in movies, I can’t do both,” he says. “It’s just too much, and I won’t do it well.”

It’s an audacious pivot for someone who sold more than 1 million tickets on the road last year. Ask Verdigets how he feels about the plan, and the CEO jokes: “On the record, I’m going with whatever Nate says.” Even Heyman, who manages Bargatze’s Hollywood business, acknowledges how much his client leaves on the table when he isn’t delivering stand-up. “If we looked at it in terms of money,” he says, “it would be idiotic to do movies.”

In reality, Bargatze will still perform, just at a vastly different scale and cadence than he has for the past 20 years. “It’ll be more like a hobby,” he says, envisioning himself popping in at Zanies or the Comedy Cellar in New York. And maybe it’s all for the best. He’s already concerned about the threats to his everyman authenticity. It’s the reason he set aside time to write the hour he’s currently touring before production on The Breadwinner got underway.

“I knew I was about to get into a world where you’re recognized a lot more and you’re not doing normal things, and you don’t want to get up there and be like, ‘Ah man, the other day, I was with the Rock,’ ” he says. “You’d never want your whole act to be about your career and success. You want it to still be about things that are relatable — the things that people come to see.”

It’s also the reason that, in addition to his solo sessions, he’s started going to therapy with his wife. “As all this stuff changes for me, it also changes for her and for our family,” he tells me. “And we want to make sure that we stay ‘us’ focused. We’re a family, and that’s what’s important — none of the other stuff matters.”

It’s getting late now, and Bargatze has to head home. He’s got a slew of things to do in the morning, then he’s back out on the road. Columbia, South Carolina. Jacksonville, Florida. Then, Orlando, where his wife and daughter will join him over the weekend. He plans to take the family to Disney World, just as an everyman would. Of course, he’ll also be doing a little market research while he’s there.

This story appeared in the Sept. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.