[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Studio Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2.]
Martin Scorsese, Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron, Greta Lee, and Sarah Polley all appear in the first two episodes of Apple TV+‘s impressive and ambitious The Studio, which debuted on Wednesday, March 26. Created by Seth Rogen (who also stars) and Evan Goldberg, the 10-episode comedy searingly satirizes Hollywood, with its main stars (Rogen, Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, and Chase Sui Wonders, all featured in the video interview above) playing characters alongside their real-life filmmaking colleagues who were game to parody themselves in this squirm-inducing but wildly fun series.
Rogen plays Matt Remick, an executive at the fictional Continental Studios who learned everything he knows from O’Hara’s Patty Leigh. When Patty is pushed out of the studio by Continental’s corporate overlord, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, whose eccentric performance will make you realize how much you’ve missed seeing him in comedies), Matt is given the job as head of the studio. He lands the coveted gig by promising to prioritize money-making films over art. Matt begins the series determined to make high art a blockbuster success. If only he was as committed to his artistic principles in practice as he is in theory.
Matt’s attempt to mix art and business leads to him greenlighting a Scorsese film about the infamous Jonestown cult, the one that made the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-aid” a colloquial phrase, to satisfy Griffin’s orders to make a Kool-Aid movie like Greta Gerwig did with Barbie. Episode 2 shows Matt, Sal (Barinholtz), and Patty on set of a new Polley film that’s trying to film a oner — a sequence filmed in one long, continuous shot — at golden hour. Matt’s presence causes a domino effect of problems as they fight to beat the setting sun. Of course, nothing goes right.
Martin Scorsese as himself in The Studio Season 1 Episode 1, “The Promotion” (Apple TV+)
The long list of guest stars will continue to surprise throughout the season. Executive producers Goldberg and James Weaver tell TV Insider that wrangling these cameos “was the hardest part of the whole show.” Every star was convinced to join by something different.
“Marty, it was the script. He just read the script and said he was in. We never met the man. It was a miracle,” Goldberg tells TV Insider. “Seth and Sarah Polley have made a film together and are old friends. Charlize and us do stuff for each other all the time because we’re friends. Dave Franco, we’ve known forever. Olivia Wilde, we had to meet her and convince her to do it and work on the character with her. Same thing with Ron Howard. He had lots of thoughts, and we had to go back and forth. So, it was a different dance every time and probably the hardest part of the whole show.”
“We knew early on it would be the thing that would separate the show and ground it in real Hollywood,” adds Weaver. “When Seth and Evan were thinking about what the show needed to be, it needed to be as if Hollywood exists and were plopping Continental Studios and these characters down inside of it, and so that was an operating idea for putting the show together always. And so in Hollywood, you have to deal with Ron Howard throwing his imagine hat at you. If he give him a bad note, that’s just what happens [laughs]. So, we had to make sure we got Ron Howard to come do the show.”
In the video above, Rogen says he wishes it was more fun to tell the cast who they booked as guest stars. In reality, it was incredibly “stressful” wrangling all of these people and having them on set, he shares, simply because he admires them all so much and wanted to make sure they were making a series worthy of the star power it attracted.
As for the oner, Episode 2 looks like it was filmed in one big shot, but “it’s not a true oner,” Goldberg reveals. “It’s four or five setups overall,” Weaver adds. Those shots were then edited together to look like one shot that lasts for the entire half-hour episode. They might not have been filming a true oner like Polley was directing in the episode, but they were dealing with filming at sunset. Life imitated art on these filming days that had incredibly short windows for filming.
Sarah Polley as herself, Catherine O’Hara as Patty, and Seth Rogen as Matt in The Studio Season 1 Episode 2, “The Oner” (Apple TV+)
“We only had about 90 to 120 minutes to film a day where the lighting would match,” Goldberg shares, “so we would rehearse all day long again and again and again, get the improvs down, figure out what we wanted to adjust, and then get three to four chances to film it. There was actually one shot where we ran out of sunlight and we were all screaming and freaking out and then the camera fritzed out. It was the only time I saw the camera department go crazy on each other.”
“It turned out there was a problem with the wifi, and it was no one’s fault, but that was the most meta experience,” Goldberg adds. “We ended up living the actual problem we were filming an episode about.”
That episode became “one of the ideas that inspired the whole shooting style for the rest of the show,” says Weaver, “this idea of how do you make every scene really immersive and really like you’re with the characters.”
Get more behind-the-scenes details from the stars in the full video interview.
The Studio, Wednesdays, Apple TV+
