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Perhaps you’ve heard of him because of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit,” or maybe you grew up as obsessed with the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer” as I did. Either way, Fischer is well known for being a chess grandmaster, the highest title a person can earn in the intellectual sport of chess. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Fischer went on to become a chess prodigy by the age of fourteen, and he eventually became the eleventh world chess champion. His chess playing has attracted many admirers over the years, but aside from his brilliance as a chess player, Fischer was also a bit of a recluse and often extremely vocal about his anti-Semitic views. In other words, let’s not try to glorify the man too much, here.
His reliance on his genius, however, was deeply inspiring to Isaac when coming up with the version of Nathan that we see on screen. In an interview with Esquire, Isaac describes Nathan, saying, “There’s an aspect to him that’s street. So I looked for that, and also something dark and misanthropic.” These traits led him to Fischer who’s “from the Bronx, self-taught, [and] he’s a chess genius,” says Isaac, going on to describe how Fischer also enlisted the help of an Olympic trainer when he was “preparing for his chess battles.” This reliance on exercise is something the character Nathan shares with the chess prodigy, a detail of Nathan’s character meant to highlight his dedication to strength and vitality.
It’s not hard to see how Isaac was able to draw a line between a chess grandmaster and a genius Silicon Valley techie. Both men, fictional or not, clearly possess an intelligence worthy of attention, but they also possess a darkness within them that distorts their genius and pushes their legacies into questionable territory. Just like we are both attracted to and suspicious of Ava and her supreme intelligence, Nathan — and the real-life chess master who partially inspired him — is as complex as trying to play chess by looking five moves ahead.
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