2022, The London Hotel, West Hollywood.
Seth Rogen and I are sitting at the bar, sipping water, waiting to do a post-screening Q&A for the show Pam & Tommy.
Me: What are you working on right now?
Him: Actually, I’m writing a thing about the inside of the industry.
Me: Well, I have some stories for you…
Him: [Pulls out phone] I’m taking notes.
—
Everyone who’s ever worked in entertainment in LA knows that Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s comedy show The Studio is basically real. Sure, it’s amped up, dialed up, condensed, but we know those people, and those scenarios. LA really is that nuts. You try to explain it to people who either don’t live here or have never worked here, and it does sound far-fetched. But the truth is, the Hollywood industry is crazy, magical, surreal and cutthroat. You put a bunch of extremely creative storytellers and artists in one town, then make the stakes super high — as in, billions of dollars high — and just see what happens. That’s Hollywood. Or it was. Lately, it’s seemed like the mystical, historical, golden-age lore of it all is slipping away, with production largely moving out, work going away and everything changing.
So, when Rogen and Goldberg, with all their cinephile sensibilities, came up with The Studio — a show that not only shoots in LA, but takes us behind the curtain of a traditional moviemaking house — it felt like both an affectionate throwback and a kind of hopeful comeback. And now, 23 Emmy nominations later, their second season is almost written.
“We’re mid-writing, we hope to start shooting in January,” Goldberg tells me, as we sit together at a photo studio somewhere down on Pico Boulevard.
Rogen: I think we’ve come up with 10 episode ideas.
Goldberg: One of them may explode.
Rogen: Two of them are contingent on incredibly elusive celebrities who I doubt we will get. So maybe we need to go with two more…
That “contingency” on celebrities is a huge part of the show, and the ability of co-creators and co-directors Rogen and Goldberg to persuade such greats as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard to send themselves up — alternately tantrumming and sobbing on screen while playing themselves — gives the viewer the feeling of, wait, how did they do that?
Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen
Michael Buckner/ Deadline
In the series, Rogen stars as Matt Remick, newly appointed head of the fictional Continental Studios. Out of his depth and facing cash-hungry CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston), Matt seeks solace from his mentor Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), whose job he has just effectively stolen. At Matt’s side are studio exec Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), head of marketing Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) and junior exec Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders).
As the team navigate the battle between art and commerce (The Kool-Aid Movie, anyone?) and jockey for position, they tangle with a laundry list of big names. Aside from Scorsese and Howard, there’s Dave Franco, Zoë Kravitz, Olivia Wilde, Anthony Mackie, Ice Cube, Sarah Polley, Charlize Theron, Zac Efron, Greta Lee and more.
So, how can they top that with their Season 2? Are they feeling the pressure?
“That’s the nice thing about there being two of us,” Goldberg says. “When one guy’s freaking out, we can bring each other back down. We already had 30 ideas for episodes. 20 more showed up between seasons. We have so many ideas. And so, it’s been a real pleasure to sit down and just choose which 10 are going to be the ones.”
Joining them and co-creators Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez in the writers’ room for Season 2 is Sarah Polley, following her guest stint playing herself as an exasperated director in Season 1. Rogen says that apart from her comedic skills, she has specific experience that will feed into something they have planned next season.
Bryan Cranston, Dave Franco and Chase Sui Wonders
Michael Buckner/ Deadline
“She’s truly hilarious and has so much insight that we don’t have,” Rogen says. “Also, she won an Oscar. She’s really been through this award stuff in a way that none of us have. And that’s sort of the theme we’ve been talking about for next season. She’s just so funny and fun to hang out with, and obviously a great writer. I was joking that it’s every writer’s dream; you win an Oscar and then become a writer on the second season of a television show!”
Rogen and Goldberg are clearly a tight unit in lock-step — they’ve been cooking up ideas together since they met at a Bar Mitzvah class when they were 12.
Rogen: I was trying to write jokes.
Goldberg: I was writing super-dark short stories.
Rogen: But kind of comedic short stories.
Goldberg: To you.
Rogen: To me they were funny.
Goldberg: They didn’t get the joke at my school, but he got it.
Rogen: We both were people who wrote in our free time and then met another person who wrote in their free time. When you’re 12 or 13, that’s pretty weird.
Goldberg: There was one other guy who wrote really emotional poetry, but we decided not to like him.
Rogen: Yeah. That would have been a real bummer.
Almost right after they met, they began writing the screenplay that would become the 2007 high school coming-of-age movie Superbad, with its two main characters named Seth and Evan. For Goldberg, getting Superbad made remains one of the most stand-out things that has ever happened to them.
Rogen says, “Having it be about our friends and about so much stuff that had actually happened to us, and for everyone we grew up with to get to see the movie and for them to know that they’re sort of represented in it in some way, [was amazing]… I think from the beginning of our careers, we’ve been writing about real things that have happened to us. And [The Studio] was one of those things where as soon as we thought of it, we instantly came up with 30 ideas for what could be episodes. Just by living, we’re getting more material for more episodes.”
Bryan Cranston
Michael Buckner/ Deadline
But, of course, truth is often stranger than fiction. Rogen points out that part of writing from real experience is to let go of needing people to believe that your story is true. “Very early on we saw that just because something really happened, it doesn’t mean it’s believable. And just as something really happened, it doesn’t mean that you can’t individually tell everyone, ‘But this really happened.’”
Case in point: If he and Goldberg had told a story of two guys who make a movie that accidentally leads to Sony Pictures being hacked, allegedly by North Korea, the exposure of sensitive emails and major industry-wide fall-out, no one would believe them. And yet, that is exactly what happened when they made The Interview. Will they put that into The Studio? After all, everyone already thinks O’Hara’s character is based on former Sony co-chair (and friend to Rogen and Goldberg) Amy Pascal.
“Honestly, the Sony hack is a thing that we’ve talked a lot about,” Rogen says. “But we want the show to be about regular things in the industry. There’s obviously been a temptation. It’s like, ‘Do we do a hack or something like that?’ But it’s so exceptional and out of the ordinary. It’s something that literally only happened to us and nobody else. That’s not the right idea. It’s more like, ‘Hmm test screenings, they’re a pain in the ass, that’d be a good episode.’”
For what it’s worth, O’Hara refutes that she was specifically told to play her role as a Pascal pastiche. “I honestly did not study her,” she says. “They know her very well. They’re very close to her. She still mentors them. They always go to her for advice. So, it’s written with love. No one ever told me, ‘Look her up, do whatever.’ I looked at pictures and stuff like that. And obviously my hair, though, she’s not the only cool, curly-haired studio exec.”
From left: Ron Howard, Anthony Mackie, Chase Sui Wonders, Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
Something both Rogen and Goldberg are clear on is that The Studio is not a satire. “The thing people keep saying,” Goldberg says, “is, ‘When you set out to make this satire…’ We didn’t say the word ‘satire’ once.”
For them, it’s not a satire because it’s real, and because they’re not upending a solemn and serious business and making fun of it. Instead, they’re just showing that world with all the seriousness experienced by the people inside of it.
Says Rogen: “To me, a satire is when you take a serious thing and make it funny. I think if anything, our show is the opposite of a satire and that we’re taking an inherently trivial thing and adding as much stakes to it as humanly possible. Veep, to me, is a satire, because that’s taking a very serious thing and turning it silly. To me, this is the opposite thing: we’re taking a silly thing and giving it life or death stakes for the people who are living it.”
Barinholtz has known Rogen and Goldberg for years. “How would I describe their particular brand of humor?” he says. “I think it’s smart-stupid… I remember when I first saw Superbad, my head exploded. That spoke to me, it was an original voice, so funny and dirty in a way, without being gross or lame. I love their voices, their writing voices… Seth and I, whether it’s in the Neighbors movies or the little TV things we’ve done together, we’re very good at both being dumb asses, but me being a little bit dumber.”
Franco, who also goes way back with them, all the way back to Superbad, says, “They’re just doing what they want to do. They’re not thinking about what they should be doing. They’re just making stuff that makes them laugh.”
From left: Sarah Polley, Catherine O’Hara and Seth Rogen in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
Rogen and Goldberg first began thinking about The Studio during the pandemic. “We talked about it for a long time,” Goldberg says, “but one day he was just like, ‘I can be the studio head.’ That was where it all put together.”
The idea was born out of a yearning for old-school purely funny comedy shows, Rogen says. “I think we could just see that drama had a strong gravitational pull in some ways, and comedy movies were not in the same place that they had been in years past.”
Goldberg adds: “It was a general complaint that people were making en masse — like, ‘Where are the funny shows? The shows that are just pure funny and a rollercoaster of laughter that no one dies in?”
Part of what also fed into making the show was their experience with the Sony hack and The Interview. Suddenly, they had been plunged into an unfamiliar world within the studio system.
“When The Interview happened, we were in very long meetings where we’re really getting a peek under the hood of the real corporate pressures that these companies face,” says Rogen. “And I think that’s largely shielded from the creatives and the filmmakers, as much as it can be. But we were in a position where it could not be shielded from us. And it was so intense that we really got to know the executives much more personally. We got to know Amy [Pascal] much better, and Doug Belgrad. The people who were running Sony at the time, we got to see sides of them that were much different from the sort of fronts that are presented to you. I think, in some ways, it made the studios seem much scarier and more cutthroat. We saw how self-preservational some people became, how scapegoating started to happen, rewriting history wholesale, lying to defend jobs.”
“We also saw that they weren’t just like, ‘F*ck your movies.’” Says Goldberg. “Some of them were like, ‘We need this balance.’”
Rogen adds, “We saw the humanity behind a lot of the executives and really saw the conflict at play between the people who really want to serve the creative goals of the movies, while balancing their corporate pressures.”
Seth Rogen and Zoë Kravitz in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
Representing an extreme end of that corporate viewpoint in The Studio is Cranston’s CEO Griffin Mill (a nod to Tim Robbins’ character of the same name in Robert Altman’s The Player). Cranston says he was instructed to play “kind of a David Zaslav type” but decided that wasn’t as funny as making Griffin into a nod to Robert Evans, complete with a groovy ’70s wardrobe, and that idea ended up in the show.
When they shot the first episode with Cranston, Rogen and Goldberg also didn’t mention that Griffin Mill would ultimately appear in his underwear, wasted in Vegas. But when he found out, Cranston didn’t mind. He leaned right into it.
“I wanted a leopard thong,’ he says. “I wanted the girdle.” He secretly arranged both with wardrobe. “I said, ‘Don’t tell them what I’m going to wear.’ So, Seth and Evan did not know what I was going to look like until we’re shooting it, and I’m coming out of that bathroom… When you think about it, this man’s 82 years old. He’s had numerous facelifts. Of course he’s going to have a girdle. Of course, he’s going to do hair plugs and dye his hair. That’s why, in the fountain scene, I said, ‘I want to do a Rudy Giuliani. I want to have the hair dye start coming down my cheeks.’”
Knowing they had this openness to collaboration and fun is part of why Cranston was all in. “It’s a tribute to Seth and Evan that they create an environment where they welcome — not just tolerate or accept — an actor’s point of view or an opinion, or an idea. They nurture it.”
Wonders also felt really welcomed by their openness. “They never make you feel like an idiot for pitching something. There’s that sense of play and silliness. I would say it’s a very silly set and that there’s totally something childlike about showing up to Seth and Evan’s set. They really maintain a sense of wonderment and it’s so collaborative.”
From left: Seth Rogen, Dave Franco and Zoë Kravitz in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
As a nascent writer and director herself, Wonders found herself deeply inspired. “The fact that Seth is able to do all these jobs and wear all these hats and be so present with all of us is a real testament for how to be on a set and how to run a set,” she says. “It just couldn’t be better vibes on this set. It’s a total trickle-down power structure; it starts from the top, and Seth is like a total leveling force. Everyone feels on the same playing field. They’re very encouraging to me, and they’re always asking about my writing, pushing me along.”
For Franco, jumping on board the showto play himself was a no-brainer. We first see him starring in a made-up Ron Howard movie, Alphabet City, and then out of his mind on drugs at CinemaCon in Vegas. “I immediately said yes, without having read the scripts, because everything they make turns to gold,” he says. “Plus, I figured it would be the closest I would ever get to being in a Ron Howard film.”
Franco had so much fun he says he “begged” to be brought back for the final two CinemaCon episodes in Vegas. He improvved a reference to his Now You See Me films — which was then embellished upon by Rogen and Goldberg. “It speaks to how nimble they are,” Franco says. “I love how they’re not precious about anything and they’re constantly rewriting, and it’s always for the benefit of the show. For me, I think I’m so happy to poke fun at myself in any way possible. And I just figured the more ridiculous we get, the better.”
Franco is joined on that Vegas trip by Zoë Kravitz, who accidentally eats way too much mushroom chocolate and has a full-on meltdown, even peeing her pants. But she said yes without even asking for details. “Honestly, as soon as I heard Seth and Evan’s names, I was like, ‘Whatever they want.’ I knew nothing about it,” she says.
Playing a version of herself was actually weirdly familiar to her — it’s a method she has long used to cope with fame. “There’s this version of yourself that people see from the outside, and you have to remember that they don’t know you, and that they’re never talking about you,” she says. “There’s this kind of avatar of celebrity, where you’re kind of this idea, and you show parts of yourself, and then the rest is projection. It’s been really important for me to understand that, so that you don’t take it personally.”
From left: Chase Sui Wonders, Ike Barinholtz, Bryan Cranston, Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
Hahn says when she signed on to the show, she trusted Rogen and Goldberg implicitly. “Because they’re Canadians,” she says, with a smile, but also, “because they come at it with no bitterness. I think they’re hilarious. The way any good satirist or comedian is, they’re such good observers. They know the material they have is so good, fertile, and amazing. I’m sure both of them have told you too, there’s really nothing in this that they haven’t experienced, and I think that’s why the specificity of it is so hilarious, especially to people in our industry. You cannot fake it. It is so specific.”
She was also drawn to the homage the show made to old Hollywood and all of its movie-making history. “Ironically, it’s a television show, but I feel like it really captures that feeling of why we’ve gotten into this in the first place, into this business… Like Patty says, ‘When you make something good, it’ll last for hundreds of years.’ It really does feel like it has movie magic dust all over it. Like the shooting of it, the look of it, the way it’s shot, the care it takes to show Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular. And the homage to so many films, the respect — like, ‘Hats off to an incredible legacy.’ There’s something very dear and wholesome about it, weirdly.”
O’Hara notes this too. “You could tell they have a love of filmmaking,” she says. “But it’s not like they’re trying to write a love letter; they just sincerely want to capture what used to be, I wouldn’t say the norm, but what used to be true about the whole movie-going experience.”
She also calls Rogen and Goldberg “kind of freaky,” because of their ability to have so much fun while working so hard. “They’re so positive and fun and fun-loving, but really hard workers and really serious about the work. And they did so much research with everybody. They have stories for I don’t know how many years of episodes.”
Martin Scorsese in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
But how did they persuade Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard to pitch in? As Rogen puts it, “We made This is the End 13 years ago, or something like that. So, I think that was all the favors we had.”
“With Scorsese, he liked the script,” Goldberg says. “That was why he did it, I think.”
Mostly though, they realized that if you give people a chance to be genuinely funny, not just a stuck-on cameo, then that has wide appeal.
Rogen says, “I remember explaining to [guest star] Quinta Brunson how the show was shot.” Brunson is part of an episode where Sal keeps getting thanked at the Golden Globes, while Matt becomes increasingly upset at his own lack of recognition. “I was like, ‘You’ll be small on the stage, but without your joke the whole episode doesn’t work, and you are really an essential building block. She was like, ‘Oh, I get that. The joke isn’t just that I’m there.’”
In an interview with Deadline on the day he was Emmy nominated for his guest role, Ron Howard explained why he said yes to the show. “It’s so well written,” he said. “I know I do a lot of these cameos where I play myself, whether it’s Arrested Development or Only Murders in the Building. I said, ‘Those are cameos, and I don’t always really like myself in them when I see them.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be cameo good, I want to be actually good.’ And so I said, ‘Who’s directing?’ And they said, ‘We are.’ And I said, ‘OK, crack the whip.’”
Barinholtz marvels at the experience of being on set alongside Howard and Scorsese and having the opportunity just to chat to them. “You’d turn to Ron Howard and be like, ‘Ron, I need an American Graffiti story.’ And he just, without hesitation, was like, ‘Oh, OK. Well. I remember Paul Le Mat and Harrison Ford used to really bully me, and I was really scared of them. And I remember one night, I had gotten this new car, and they were in their hotel, and they were throwing glass bottles, breaking them, and they were getting closer and closer to my car, and I came out and I was like, ‘Hey guys, how you doing? This is a new car. If you could just make sure the bottles don’t hit it.’ And Harrison Ford just throws a bottle at my feet and goes, ‘Dance Opie!’ [A reference to Howard’s character Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show]. Same thing with Marty too. I’m just standing there with him, just me and him, just looking at each other, smiling, and then it’s just like, ‘So Marty, what’s your favorite French New Wave movie?’”
Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
If one big swing was going after those guest stars, another was shooting everything in long continuous shots — or ‘oners’ — something that was brand new to Rogen and Goldberg.
“Our whole upbringing in comedy is really based around doing a lot of improv,” Rogen says, “then covering with seven cameras and then finding it in the edit basically. We were doing essentially the exact opposite of that. And so, it really was weighing on me heavily, I would say, for the first few weeks. And then, I got over it and started to be excited about it. But I was really nervous.”
Goldberg at times felt tempted to give up on it, such was the difficulty involved. “I was, like, ‘Straight-up, dude, I’m going back to the other way’ a few times, and I still like it, but it doesn’t give you the rush.
“As a performer, I greatly prefer it.” Rogen says. “The energy associated with these long takes is hard to come back from.”
As the camera moves through each scene in those long shots, we feel as though we are the camera, walking through the studio, through the party, into the screening room, meeting the stars. But the logistics of making these oners work “like a Jazz orchestra” Rogen says. It’s so intense that they made a whole Season 1 episode about it, called “The Oner” in which Matt visits Sarah Polley’s set and keeps accidentally interrupting her oner, so they have to start the whole thing over just as they’re losing the light.
Dave Franco in ‘The Studio’
Apple TV+
“It’s so complicated,” Rogen says. “It takes so much work and so much planning… The phone has to hit the right time, the person has to enter the room at the right time, and if it’s a half-second off, the whole thing doesn’t work anymore. And so, trusting that everyone was really, really good at their jobs became a thing that really took the edge off the whole process.”
The Vegas party scene was particularly tough, with so many moving parts. Goldberg recalls how “one background extra drinking a glass of wine oddly f–ked it all up. He kept smelling it, like ‘this is a smell your wine’ part.” Rogen laughs. “Yeah, just like, dude, if you knew what this was f–king with, you would not be doing that.”
Camera operator Mark Goellnicht became the MVP of the shoot. “Our camera operator Mark was as essential to the process as me, or anybody. If he wasn’t able to do what he did, it literally wouldn’t have worked,” says Rogen.
Says Goldberg, “Before a big scene, I would ask everyone, ‘Have you been to the washroom?’” He jokes that the only person allowed to interrupt the oner for a bathroom break was Goellnicht.
“Momentum was really important,” Rogen says. “You start to get a muscle memory for the scenes, so the idea of having to stop for 25 minutes just as it’s really working… the boom operator finally found out where you can hide, and it took him a few takes to figure it out, but he’s got it now, and I was fumbling to put on the jacket, and this time the costume people have found a way to drape it over the chair…”
O’Hara says of the experience: “We’re just staring at each other’s eyeballs. Like, ‘Don’t blow it. Don’t blow it. Don’t blow it.’ When you get to a good one and everyone feels good, it’s really exhilarating.”
Seth Rogen
Michael Buckner/ Deadline
Doing long takes where he had to show up in a drug-fueled mania proved hard on Franco. “If you would’ve seen me in between takes,” he says, “I am hunched over gasping for air, trying to muster up the energy for the next take. We were all exhausted and a little bit delirious, and I definitely leaned into that energy and how I was really feeling lent itself well to what I was doing in these scenes. It almost feels like you’re doing a play.”
Franco was so tired on the two-week Vegas shoot that he skipped the cast trip to the Sphere to see The Grateful Dead. “The irony is that I played a character who was on this cocktail of drugs, but over the weekend when everyone went to do acid at the Grateful Dead Show, I went home and stayed in bed with my two cats.”
Meanwhile, back at the Sphere, not everyone dropped acid, but Cranston did agree to a little something. “Everything is pointing in the direction of, ‘I think you need to microdose. Microdosing is appropriate now.’ And it’s like, ‘I’ve never done it. Catherine O’Hara’s never done it.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, no. We’re afraid.’ But it was a lot of fun. And Ike Barinholtz is going, ‘I swear to you, it’ll be OK.’”
Evan Goldberg
Michael Buckner/ Deadline
Now, as Rogen and Goldberg work on bagging more silver screen greats to guest in Season 2, I remind them they had once mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis.
“Do you know him?” Goldberg says quickly, as in, can you help us get him?
Says Rogen, “We’ve approached the people’s agents, and they were like, ‘There’s almost zero chance this person will do this.’ And we’re like, ‘Almost zero? We’ll take it.’ We don’t make it easy on ourselves, in that a lot of these episode ideas are really hard to change [because they’re] based on the person. There’s one this season where if one person says no, the whole episode has to be thrown in the garbage, unfortunately. So, we really set ourselves up. We are comfortable getting nos, but I’d rather get a definitive no from the person than a hypothetical no from their agent. So often agents don’t even want to bother the person with this.”
We spitball about how they could engineer an ‘accidental’ run in with Daniel Day-Lewis. “Yes!” Rogen laughs. “Like, ‘Daniel! What a coincidence!’”
But they they’ve more than proven their concept with Season 1, surely booking those stars will be easier this time around? “Well, statistically, they’ll get a guest acting Emmy nomination if they say yes,” he deadpans. He’s right. The Emmy guest acting category is stacked with The Studio’s stars, with Scorsese, Howard, Cranston, Franco, Kravitz and Mackie all making the cut.
As we wrap up the photo shoot, Rogen slings his suit jacket over his shoulder and prepares to drive himself home. Goldberg has already swapped his suit for shorts and sneakers. As they head out to the street, Goldberg turns back.
“It is all true,” he says.
Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Bryan Cranston and Dave Franco shot exclusively by Michael Buckner for Deadline on location at Edge Studios in Los Angeles.
Chase Sui Wonders — Stylist: Thomas Carter Phillips at The Wall Group. Look: Sandy Liang | @sandyliang. Shoes: Jude | @judethebrand. Earrings: Melinda Maria | @melindamaria_jewelry. Rings: Rachel Katz Jewelry | @rachelkatzjewelry. Bryan Cranston — Stylist: Michael Fisher for The Wall Group. Stylist assistants: Molly MacIntosh and Christina Corso. Look: Loro Piana.