The upcoming Apple TV+ comedy series “The Studio” could be the streamer’s next big hit — or its most inside baseball, er, inside industry show ever.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg co-created the 10-episode series, where Rogen stars as ambitious — and prone-to-pratfalling — producer Matt Remick. He’s the newly appointed head of the fictional Continental Studios, tasked with churning out studio slop like a Kool-Aid movie meant to capitalize on Mattel’s growing reign in Hollywood. Or asking “Smile” and “Smile 2” director Parker Finn to direct a movie called “Wink,” which is basically the same concept as those horror movies but with a, well, wink instead of a lethal smile. “It’s not a formula so much as a structure that we know 100 percent works so we’re going to do it over and over again,” Matt explains at one point of the company’s ethos.
Each episode of the series (launching March 26) includes at least one filmmaker cameo that will amuse film fans, like Matt crushing Martin Scorsese’s dreams of making a movie about Jim Jones by trying to turn that trenchant script of cult mass murder into his for-hire Kool-Aid movie (since that was, after all, what killed Jonestownians anyway). Charlize Theron, Ron Howard, Zoë Kravitz, Olivia Wilde, Sarah Polley, Parker Finn, Ted Sarandos, Scorsese, and many more all appear playing themselves throughout the series, and IndieWire recently spoke to Rogen about some of the most unexpected cameos and how he nabbed them.
“We were very lucky. We wrote ourselves into very specific corners with a lot of these roles. Those are both great examples [Olivia Wilde and Parker Finn] where we needed someone for Olivia, where you believe a studio would be very excited to work [with her]. Someone who’s made big movies with big stars but has an allure to them, and someone who themselves is a star, so it would make my character even more willing to buy their line of bullshit a little bit and look past some of the red flags,” Rogen said.
Wilde eventually appears as a volatile filmmaker who goes rogue on the set of her latest film, where the episode becomes a noir detective story about who stole a missing reel. But Wilde and the series may also be implicitly playing with the persona she was rumored to have developed while filming on the set of “Don’t Worry Darling,” accused in tabloids and reports of clashing with star Florence Pugh while having a fling with Harry Styles — lest you blocked out all the drama on that set three years ago.
“For someone like that, there’s like Olivia and four other people on the planet who could play that role. Thank god we went to her first, and she said yes,” he said, though Rogen didn’t comment on how any of Wilde’s version of herself in the show came from those rumors.
“For Parker [Finn], too, it was even more specific. We needed a horror director who was willing to act, who had directed a few horror movies that had a gimmick that was reputable and also applicable to other films,” Rogen said. “Parker, who did ‘Smile,’ there’s really maybe nobody else. Our backup was, like, ‘Would “M3GAN” work?’” Rogen said. “We brought it for Parker specifically, and he was willing to do it. We did not put ourselves in an easy position. Thank god a lot of these people panned out.”
As for another filmmaker Rogen would love to cameo in a potential future season, he said, “David Fincher. I think of people who have a very specific thing they’re associated with. Someone like Fincher would be funny. He’s doing 400,000 takes of an insert shot.”
One cameo viewers will see when the first two episodes drop March 26 is Sarah Polley directing Greta Lee in a one-take scene that Matt, simply by dropping in on set to observe, ends up totaling many times over.
Also lured by Rogen for a great inside joke of a cameo is film reporter, “The Town” podcaster, and Puck co-founder Matthew Belloni, previously at The Hollywood Reporter for 15 years. Matt regularly listens to “The Town” while cruising in his convertible on Sunset Blvd. (OK, the one thing this show gets wrong about the town in question is how empty of traffic Sunset Blvd. looks at any point!) But Belloni also shows up for a viciously embarrassing encounter with Bryan Cranston’s studio head later in the season, which we won’t spoil.
“I literally messaged [Belloni] on Instagram. It started as just the voice. I was like, ‘Your podcast is a very convenient expositional tool for us, and it would be great if you could record stuff,’ I believe his exact response was, ‘That’s funny: Expositional tool was my nickname in high school,’” Rogen said. “We then thought it would be funny to physically include him in the episodes and have him be this threat of if he finds out the shenanigans we are up to, the whole studio could come crashing down… It wasn’t that hard. Most people are happy to be included on the joke.”
“The Studio” premieres on Apple TV+ March 26. Stay tuned for more IndieWire coverage.
