‘The Studio’s Seth Rogen And Co-Creator Evan Goldberg On The “Miracle” Of Casting Scorsese And What Ron Howard Said About His Role

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg admit they were a couple of big talkers when they first pitched The Studio to Apple TV+. With grandiose promises of starry cameos for scenes about real-life Hollywood shenanigans, the duo quickly backed themselves in a corner as they “frantically tried to deliver.” 

Case in point for their self-described “workplace comedy” about a newly-installed studio head named Matt Remick and his burning desire for approval and box office success: Rogen and Goldberg wanted to write an episode about a relatively nascent female director who’s famous enough to cameo in her own movie, while fancy enough to enamor a sycophantic studio head. She’s female-forward and approachable, with an affinity for attracting headlines.  

There were less than a handful of women who fit that bill, and “if we didn’t get one of them, we’re f*cked,” recalled Goldberg.  

Luckily for them both, Olivia Wilde said yes. The result was an episode in which Wilde hides a reel of her neo-noir crime film because she was desperate to reshoot a gunfight with star Zac Efron. 

“Getting people on board was one of the biggest challenges we had for the first season,” reflects Rogen, who already had his hands full playing the character of Matt, a harried suit who is, says Rogen, “constantly doing what he needs to do to survive and fight another day.”  

“We’ve called in all our favors many, many years ago. We got everyone who was only willing to do this stuff because we were friends with them,” Rogen says of his longtime partnership with Goldberg. (The two met aged 12 at a bar mitzvah class and have collaborated on such films as Superbad, Pineapple Express, This is the End and The Interview.) “But we had a few of those left, I think.” 

“We knew we had to top ourselves, then top ourselves again, and then triple-top ourselves this time, as is usually our best strategy,” adds Goldberg. “And that was by far the hardest part of the show, delivering those cameos. It was exhausting. Every single day at lunch during pre-production, we had to go and do a phone call with a different celebrity of some nature, or the filmmaker. And it was really draining.”  

When setting out to create this latest comedy that also features Ike Barinholtz, Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara, the duo were looking to create a realistic version of Hollywood, one in which there are no more “scumbags and egomaniacs here than what you could find in finance, real estate dealings, the construction industry or manufacturing.”  

“They get this bad rap, but most of the people in Hollywood are beautiful, wonderful people who could have done anything else and chose to do this because they love it.”

Evan Goldberg

“They’re just more seen,” Goldberg says of those, ahem, Tinseltown scumbags and egomaniacs. “They get this bad rap, but most of the people in Hollywood are beautiful, wonderful people who could have done anything else and chose to do this because they love it — from the props master to the PAs, to the craft service producers, to the actors. So, when we’re showing the dirtier, sh*ttier sides of the industry, it doesn’t feel like we’re taking cheap pot shots because the whole thing is a love letter. And one that we want to be, again, a realistic portrayal of Hollywood, not a shined-up one or a dirty one.”  

Job one, of course, was to keep production in Los Angeles. “If we didn’t shoot in LA, we would’ve failed before we even started,” says Goldberg.  

The next step was to deliver on that promise of realism by populating their world with bona fide, high-wattage guests. To plan for the cameos, Goldberg and Rogen would either recruit a celebrity first and write his or her scene later. Or, in situations like the one involving Martin Scorsese, the duo wrote a scene specifically for the iconic director and, “to our absolute shock and bafflement,” he said yes to appearing in the pilot episode where he pitches Matt on a big-budget movie about Jonestown. 

In the scene, Scorsese describes it as being about “Jim Jones, the United States Senate, America. It’s sprawling, it’s big, it’s fun, it’s f*cked up. Granted, it’s f*cked up. But I see it as a meditation on cults, hero worship, mass murder, suicide, everything. It’s life.” 

“We never FaceTimed with him. We’d never met him until the day he came to shoot,” says Goldberg. “He just liked the script and agreed based on the script, which was an absolute miracle.” 

Even before Scorsese blew them away with his rhapsodic pitch about the cult leader, Ron Howard was actually the first celebrity to sign on to the series. He shows up in Episode 3 after having directed Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco in a film called Alphabet City. Though artsy and action-packed at first, the movie ends up being almost three hours long because of an “interminable” motel sequence at the end that’s an ode to Howard’s dead cousin.

“Not everyone plays themselves. There are two versions of the joke. Either you play into the persona that you have or completely against persona that you have. It’s a pretty 50/50 split as far as who is portraying themselves as a terrible version.

Seth Rogen

“Ron wanted to really take it seriously,” remembers Goldberg, whose relationship with Bryce Dallas Howard in the 2011 film 50/50 opened the door to a meet-and-greet with the famed director. “He got an acting coach to brush up on his skills. We had many, many calls with him about character, how to do it and what was the balance. We would read with him sometimes over Zoom.”  

More important, Howard was game to send up his reputation as one of the nicest men in Hollywood — particularly when it comes time for the Continental execs to address how he needs to ax that final scene. Their inability to have the hard talk with Howard begins a whole dialogue about how everyone cowers in the face of celebrities; even former studio head Patty Leigh (O’Hara) didn’t have the heart to tell Howard in person that she “almost drilled a hole into my brain to kill the part of me that senses time” when she watched the movie’s third act.  

What Goldberg and Rogen ended up writing was a knee-slapping moment in which Howard berates Matt for giving him the much-needed editing note and the director responds by getting violent and dropping several f-bombs — which, apparently, is completely in character for the guy who once played Opie.  

“Ron was like, I’ve been around a long time, and if you don’t think I’ve screamed at an executive in a room full of people, you’d be dead wrong,” recalls Goldberg. 

Sarah Polley had similar thoughts for her cameo in Episode 2, in which she’s trying to get a “oner” with Greta Lee before they lose the natural light. Initially, the Women Talking Oscar winner registered her concerns that Rogen and Goldberg made her on-screen alter-ego in the second episode too nice and boring when Matt visits — and ends up disrupting — her set. 

“She was like, ‘I should have some kind of insidious thing I’m doing,” says Goldberg. “Let’s play with my character and the fact that people think I’m this super nice lady, but she’s also a bad ass. She knows how to get sh*t done and be tough when she must be.’ So, she was like, ‘Let’s take that and exaggerate it and blow it out.’”

“This show has legs. It just keeps writing itself. Things keep happening. We’re in an industry that is ever-evolving. Before, we sat with studio heads and heads of marketing to get their input to help us. Now people are just coming up to us, telling us stuff.

Evan Goldberg

That’s exactly what attracted Zoë Kravitz to the series, in which she plays a “more psychotic” version of herself as she campaigns for a Golden Globe. (Her appearance in Episode 8 was so delightful that Rogen and Goldberg ended up penning more for her in the final two episodes). 

“If you can’t make fun of yourself, I think there’s something wrong,” she told Deadline in May. “And so, I was really excited to make fun of myself, or the idea of myself, and the awards cycle, and all of that. I think it’s something to laugh at and to explore — it’s not just pointing and laughing.” 

So, what is it about celebrities who raise their hands at wanting to come across as bigger jerks than they really are? Goldberg and Rogen have their theories as to why they were able to recruit the likes of Nick Stoller, Charlize Theron, Adam Scott, Ice Cube, Peter Berg, Steve Buscemi, Lil Rel Howery, Paul Dano, Johnny Knoxville and more. 

“You don’t want to run the risk of people thinking you are a jerk,” says Goldberg. “This is legit material going out into the world to be seen by the masses. And if you’re close to who you are and just kind of an asshole, then people’s brains will be like, Olivia Wilde’s like a f*cking asshole. You’ve got to make sure that people know it’s a joke. Otherwise, yeah, you might just come away with some icky feelings about how you’re perceived.” 

“In general, famous people in the industry are viewed as tyrannical and have this persona of being egotistical and narcissistic,” adds Rogen. “Not everyone plays themselves. There are two versions of the joke. Either you play into the persona that you have or completely against persona that you have. It’s a pretty 50/50 split as far as who is portraying themselves as a terrible version. Because for every Ron Howard, there’s a Johnny Knoxville who’s portraying a normal version of himself.”  

Rogen did that in Episode 6. In the episode called “The Pediatric Oncologist”, Matt attends a charity gala with Sarah, a doctor girlfriend played by Rebecca Hall. Matt grows increasingly irritated when Sarah’s friends belittle his line of work — something that Rogen has experienced first-hand in real life while raising money with his wife for their Alzheimer’s charity.  

“It’s something that I have definitely felt at these events from time to time,” admits Rogen. “I find that that doctors take joy in sort of diminishing the work of people in the entertainment industry. I think they know people in the entertainment industry are used to having smoke blown up their asses and having an outsized amount of praise they don’t deserve. As people who literally save people’s lives, I think they appreciate they’re able to sort of recalibrate the amount of respect one receives for the work and to be part of that recalibration.” 

Now that The Studio has been renewed by Apple, Rogen and Goldberg are feeling more confident about their ability to recruit even bigger names for Season 2. It helps that one is actually a holdover from the first season. 

“We actually have one script that I assume will be in Season 2, that’s finished, called ‘The Test Screening’,” says Goldberg. “We worked on it for months because it required a very specific actor, and we almost got that actor, but then they were too busy, so we had to move on.” 

And though there will always be those select few who would prefer to not spoof themselves on the small screen, the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since all 10 episodes streamed on Apple. And that’s a good thing, because the duo has only just begun to depict their absurdist vision of the industry.

 “This show has legs,” says Goldberg. “It just keeps writing itself. Things keep happening. We’re in an industry that is ever-evolving. Before, we sat with studio heads and heads of marketing to get their input to help us. Now people are just coming up to us, telling us stuff. So, the influx of stories is never ending.”