This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.
You don’t have to be chronically online to be familiar with one of the best reaction clips circulating right now: a blonde Peloton instructor, looking more steely-gazed and austere than Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, kicking someone out of her class with the iconic line “Get ‘em banned—we don’t do that here,” delivered as if she's banishing her unseen agitator to the Phantom Zone. It’s since been co-opted for everything from jokes about TV shows to earnestly calling out trolls on Twitter. But the meme’s narrative took a turn when the main character herself, Kendall Toole, started replying to tweets about her—particularly one that pegged her performance in the clip as utilizing the famed “Kubrick Stare.”
According to Kendall, this was entirely intentional—turns out she’s a shameless cinephile who can go from talking Kubrick to giving mini-Hitchcock dissertations in the span of a few Tweets. Naturally, I had to extend an invitation to her to come on Tap In, explain what the hell is actually going on in the internet’s favorite clip and more importantly, talk all things film.
It turns out the clip is over two years old and Kendall isn’t at Peloton anymore; in November, she launched her own wellness app, NKOClub. “There's mental wellness stuff, five types of movement,” Kendall says. “It's just continuing to grow and evolve—if they liked my energy of standing on business, you could get that all the time every week with new classes.” Below, Kendall talks about just what kind of business she was standing on in that class, her favorite Hitchcock films, and how much of a movie nerd she really is.
Kendall Toole: So the backstory of this is kind of wild because it had a moment in 2024 right after it happened—I believe this class was in 2023, and there was this habit that started happening. People would make these leaderboard usernames, and it was very Bart Simpson. It would be something like, H-U-G-H, underscore and then A-N-U-S-S. I got a kick out of it, and I would get gotten a lot. It’d be like, "Hugh Anuss, happy 200.. .damn it." And then what are you going to do? You got to play with it, it's live. People would clip that and put it on TikTok, and then it became like, "Oh, I can make this a moment. Let me try to get her when she teaches her classes."
But unfortunately, in this particular instance, it was a new username and it was terrible. The rumor is that the leaderboard name was “Pedalphile,” which is still heinous, but that is not what it was. It was something super awful, super, super racist. I saw it, and I was shocked, because not only was someone trying to get me to say that, but other people in the class could see that leaderboard name, and I'm like, "This is so uncomfortable.” It was just disgusting. So clearly I got mad—really mad.
Yeah, I was trying to be professional… I'm live on camera, there's thousands of people in this class. We have no tape delay, this is livestream. I'm going to hear from my boss later if I don't handle it right. But then I'm also like, We have to protect the community, because this is screwed up. And then I'm also like, How do I try to make it an empowering thing?
And so at that point I was like, "Okay, no—we don't do that here." And I was like, "I am not the one," because I was so mad, but I couldn't express why I was mad without getting more attention. Then I made the rest of the class really hard because I was angry—like, Well, we're all going to work through this together.
The first time I went semi-viral, people were saying "Oh, she's so cringe. What's she so pissed off about?" I know what it was. I had a right to be pissed off. And then now, for it to blow up this last week, it was wild. It was beautiful that people were using the clip as, like, "If we don't like something, we want to stand against something. This is the energy that we want." And now everyone's calling me “mother,” which—I'm honored. I'll be mama, thank you.
I have no clue. One of our friends who's in marketing asked "Did y'all plant this? This is too perfect." If we could have planted that, we would've done it around launch back in November. My instinct is that because of what's going on with the Epstein files coming out and all of the very valid outrage, it’s connected because people thought that moment was about pedophiles—but still, I don't know. And this is what's scary because the internet lives forever.
Virality is fascinating too, how it transfers. It started on X and now it's popping off on TikTok and Instagram. It’s still like, "Huh. What? I don't get it."
But yeah, I went to film school at USC. Huge cinephile, absolutely love movies, always have. I geekily dressed up as Lauren Bacall for Halloween in the seventh grade, nobody knew who it was, I did the whole Lauren Bacall eye thing with the red lip.
I did this series when I was at Peloton called Movie Buff, and it was like movie scores and film references in all of these classes. In one of them, I was like, I want to do a Kubrick stare, but also, with the angle of the cameras and just the eyes that I have—I might have been pulling the Kubrick stare for a minute in my subconscious anyway. That was deep in my subconscious, and I probably did that semi-strategically because I was so mad, and I wanted to deliver the emotion of it. So I laughed when someone was talking about Kubrick and they're like, "Oh my God, yes, cinephile queen." And then I get into a discourse about Hitchcock…
Oh my God. Hitchcock is my number one. At USC we watched every single Hitchcock, anything he created from short films when he was younger, all the way to the end. We had four Saturdays where we'd watch movies from 10:00 AM till 10:00 PM, and you had to go to at least two of them or watch on your own to be able to be good for the final. I love how good he was at building tension. We live in such a CG, overdone, overproduced world. I think we're on the verge of another golden age. I think we really need it badly. I'm hoping we start to pull back into what we know, But yeah, Hitchcock is definitely up there. I'm a big Rear Window girl. Vertigo is insane. I mean, Strangers on a Train was good.
Well, I grew up in Santa Clarita. Another piece of lore is that I used to act as a kid.
Oh, this goes real deep. I really wanted to be a kid actor growing up. I just love storytelling. I wanted to make movies, and I wanted to tell stories. When I was a little kid, I had a little blue camera and we did stop-motion stuff with it. So I had agents, did the whole thing, and I got really close on some movies and really close on a TV show, almost shot the pilot… then got recast. I've been through the whole thing. It was kind of interesting because I got so close on so many things, but I always felt like I was outside the fishbowl. I had a lot of friends that were on Nick and Disney and doing all this stuff, and I was like, "Am I ever going to get chosen? Is it ever going to be my time?"
I got to shoot a feature right before I started at USC. And then that film was supposed to take off at Sundance. It was at Berlin, and then there was all this drama and that careened off the tracks. I gave up acting, but I was like, "I don't want to wait for someone to give me a job. I want to start writing movies and making movies and producing movies. I want to be the one making the decisions." At USC, I had a mentor who's a film director who is the reason why I got into boxing. He said, "You have a lot going on. Come by the gym."
And I fell in love with boxing. Boxing is what got me into teaching and fitness. And then that brought Peloton, and now here we are.
Totally. You have eight cameras, it's live-streamed. The format with Peloton is more about entertainment, I would argue, than it is even about fitness at a certain point.
I'm very proud of the fact, if you were taking my classes, I'm very difficult but I love to build a playlist. I am obsessed with movie scores and Hans Zimmer and all that, and how to tell a story and have a really good fitness class. Particularly when you're doing something as boring as cycling, you really need as much help as you can get to keep it interesting.
With Peloton, music licensing was really difficult. On my new app, I'm really proud of the fact we have commercial music. We have a streaming license. I custom curated all of these playlists, and I tell you what energy to go for the class.
But yeah, we did so many cool things. I did a Halloween episode. The whole narrative was that I secretly was the villain, and I was chasing after them at the very end. It's worth a Razzie, but it's very camp. I did the Kubrick stare, and then I was like, "Hereeee's Kendall." I think back on it and I'm like, fuck, that's so cringe.” I did a whole episode about female heroes. We had the score from Wonder Woman. We had the score from Memoirs of a Geisha.
I binge everything. I've been back in my film noir era. I went back and watched Mulholland Drive. Hold on. I literally made a list. I knew that we were going to talk about this, and I get so bad when people ask me on the spot.
Okay, this is embarrassing. I did not know Letterboxd was a thing. Until everyone on Twitter was like, "What's your Letterboxd, queen?" I don't have one. But here's my argument: I'm on social media so much, I just can't do another thing.
But I do log my favorite movies in a notebook. I'm old school. I write about what I thought about it, how I felt about it.
Yeah, I have the analog version of Letterboxd. I don't need to make more content for public consumption. Your girl's tired.
I'm going to go for my favorite four feel-good movies, what I always put on. Some of it's embarrassing, some of it's good. Some Like It Hot is always my favorite little silly, playful go-to, whenever I'm in a bad mood. Rear Window. If I'm missing Los Angeles, I will watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, because so many of the locations are spots that I grew up in. I mean, Raising Arizona I love, which is weird and different. True Romance.
New Beverly had a midnight screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but we were flying out at 6:00 AM the next morning. I was like, "Fuck." I would so go to see it in a theater setting. I love that you brought that up. Have you done the cemetery screenings at Hollywood Forever?
I did that in October. There’s this Italian restaurant across the way that you can get a picnic basket from, then you get a little bottle of wine. The Hollywood Forever screenings are an all-time favorite. It’s such a vibe, and it's not creepy. One thing I would love is for drive-in movies to come back. Wouldn't that be cool? Whenever I go back to LA, I go through Hollywood and it’s like, Netflix bought everything. It was never like this, and look, it's cool, they have a lot of money, they do a lot of cool work, I'm not going to lie—it'd be cool to end up on a Netflix show one day, or to have a show on Netflix, we all would love that. But there's so much movie magic and old history, especially in downtown LA and those old theaters. I always wanted to redo one of those and make it a community center or a theater. You don't get that energy like you used to anymore.
Well, usually in times of crisis, cinema is a thing that brings us together. They say that every 100 years things repeat themselves. Back then it was the stock market crash, we have this huge surge into technology and AI. We have so much corruption and instability around us. We feel so lost and overwhelmed, but hyper-connected, but also super disconnected, to me. And the hopeful stance is "Oh my gosh, this is a time when the arts comes in." And protecting being human is going to be even more important in the next five, seven years in particular with AI.
I feel like there's an awakening happening. It's really odd—I can't describe it, but it's like we're in the demolition phase, and I believe society goes back to communal art when we're in dire straits. We go back to the basics, and I think expression and creation are the most beautiful acts of rebellion against when the systems don't work for us anymore. I think we're really close. The tension has gotten to such a point that I hope we snap and hit that reset button.
People don't want to be told what to watch. They don't want to be in a curated algorithm for what their taste should be. People are curious more than ever, and we don't have access to that. That's why I didn't want to work for a big company. I'd rather have a smaller community that is really connected than be a part of a billion dollar brand that's always worried about what the stock market is doing and what investors do, but not about what their community wants, which is where the company really worked early on. I think we're on the precipice of something really fascinating.
I'm going to be completely transparent, I've been so focused on building the business. It's been a bad year of not being able to consume great art. Obviously [I need to catch up] before the Oscars, I have all my screeners. I need to just sit my butt down. I'm so behind, and it's embarrassing, it's just been a crazy year. Launching a business will do that to you. My whole world has been that, but is there anything you recommend that I should watch that you think is such a sign of it?
I've seen Sinners, I did like it. It was actually a perspective. It was a screenwriters' true take and I loved the layered perspective of what everything meant and how those metaphors obviously tied into today—I thought that was really fitting.
It's fun and it's embarrassing—but it was always on HBO…
I was acting enough in high school that I was homeschooled, so I had a whole year just to focus on acting and give it one more college try before I went to college. So I spent so much time—I watched every Scorsese movie from tip to tail. I would pick an auteur director and I'd watch everything they'd ever done. That was my pre-film school education. But what was always on TV was Ocean's Eleven.
Oh, that's a great pick. That’s not embarrassing at all!
I love Steven Soderbergh. I've always enjoyed his work. Obviously Erin Brockovich is amazing. But something about the Ocean's movies, I love a Rat Pack-y heist vibe.
I just saw that on a big screen out here too.
The coolest thing, too, with Soderbergh, is you can see his references. I loved his cinematography, But there's something about that and the score. It's that sticky 1970s music. Every time I go back to Vegas, I always feel a little sad. It doesn't look like what it looked like in Ocean's Eleven.
I had the biggest crush on Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in that movie, so beautiful and so stunning. And the funny part is I was obsessed with ancient Egyptian culture when I was in elementary school. Weird kid. I tried to teach myself the hieroglyphics in the fifth grade. I'm not joking. I wish I was.
My parents were like, “She's a strange one.”
Sign up for Tap In to get Frazier’s weekly culture diary, exclusively in your email.