Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Studio” Season 1.
You can’t make an authentic show about Hollywood without some celebrity cameos. That’s something that “The Studio,” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s comedy for Apple TV+, knows too well and delivers in spades. By the season’s end, the industry satire features everyone from Ramy Youssef and Ice Cube to Adam Scott and Netflix head Ted Sarandos, all not-so-subtly mocking their public personas.
But out off all the celebrities, there were a select few that stood out to this very talented — and very funny — ensemble.
“[Martin] Scorsese was very impressive and a very funny performer, like legitimately funny,” Rogen, who plays the new head of Continental Studios Matt Remnick, told TheWrap in an interview that included the comedy’s five leads. “He was really firing on all cylinders and was saying stuff that was making me and Ike [Barinholtz] laugh so hard as we were filming these scenes. He really wanted to improvise a lot, which was very difficult, considering how we were shooting things. But you can’t tell him not to. We just found a way to make it work.”
Barinholtz, who plays Continental vice president of production Sal Saperstein, also praised the legendary director. But his pick was Dave Franco.
“We were really exhausted shooting the last couple episodes in Las Vegas and having Dave Franco show up with so much energy was a real delight,” Barinholtz said.
Like Rogen, both Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn highlighted directors as guest stars who impressed them. For O’Hara, who plays Matt’s mentor Patty Leigh, the former Continental head who’s ousted from the studio at the beginning of the series, filmmaker Sarah Polley came to mind.
The “Women Talking” director appears in Episode 2 as a version of herself. The “Studio” version of Polley is desperate to capture a one-shot for her upcoming movie “The Silver Lake” despite Matt’s clumsy efforts.
“She’s so cool. She’s so talented, and I love the power she had on the set. She maintained that power, but in a lovely, gracious Canadian way,” O’Hara said.
“Ron Howard,” Hahn added.
Matt’s entire team, including Hahn’s confident and unpredictable head of marketing Maya, are forced to confront Howard in “The Note.” In the episode, Howard turns in a cut of his latest film that everyone agrees is perfect, save for a far too long ending sequence. When they learn that the bad scenes actually mean the most to Howard, the Continental team has to give a hard note to one of the nicest guys in Hollywood.
“He really committed to it, and there’s a rage under there that I hadn’t anticipated, which was really a delight,” Hahn said.
Last but certainly not least is Chase Sui Wonders’ pick: David Krumholtz, whom she said “has not gotten enough love.” Though Wonders’ junior assistant Quinn doesn’t share the screen with Krumholtz’s talent agent Mitch Weitz often, the “Oppenheimer” and “10 Things I Hate About You” actor is a standout. Every time Krumholtz appears in “The Studio” he makes Matt increasingly uncomfortable with his jokes about Judaism.
“There’s just a distinct moment in Vegas — you would have some breaks when the camera panned off of you. You had to be locked in, but you could fall into the background. But David Krumholtz, I remember looking over to him in the wings behind a curtain — definitely off camera — and he was going full throttle at Seth’s character the hardest I’ve ever seen, like whipping him, slapping him,” Wonders said. “He had no business committing that hard off camera.”
As many deep cut cameos as “The Studio” featured throughout its first season, Rogen was never worried about his show feeling too inside baseball.
“If you have no idea who Ted Sarandos is, all you need to get is there’s another guy who keeps getting thanked, and [my character] is jealous of him,” Rogen explained. “They were really filling specific character roles and serving certain jokes in the episode. The fact that we were able to get the real people who would be doing that in real life was very exciting, but we always tried to contextualize them comedically.”
“The Studio” is now streaming on Apple TV+.
