How Seth Rogen Got Ron Howard, Sarah Polley, and Olivia Wilde to Play Wild Versions of Themselves on THE STUDIO
If you haven’t started watching The Studio yet, you’ve got to remedy that! It’s one of the sharpest and funniest comedies of the year, and Seth Rogen is clearly having the time of his life playing Matt Remick, the chaotic new head of the fictional company Continental Studios.
The show, co-created by Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Veep vets Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, is jam-packed with hilarious industry satire and it features a surprising roster of real-life directors who are amusingly roasting their own reputations. So how did they pull that off?
Well, turns out a big part of the answer is simple, they just asked. And apparently, Seth Rogen asking you to be the unhinged Hollywood version of yourself is pretty hard to turn down.
Let’s start with Ron Howard. In the episode “The Note,” Howard plays himself as a smiling, deeply petty version of Hollywood royalty, holding a decades-old grudge against Matt Remick over a Beautiful Mind script suggestion.
It was also all Howard’s idea to lean into the jerkiness of the over-exaggerated version of himself. Alex Gregory shared the story with CinemaBlend:
“I think Ron Howard really appreciated that Seth and Evan wanted to make him an asshole. I’m sure he's probably heard when he's being introduced on talk shows, ‘The nicest guy in Hollywood!’
“I'm sure in his mind he's like, ‘I’m not always that nice.’ So I think it was probably a lot of fun for him to just vent the 0.0001% of him that feels that way. He was just down for it.”
Howard’s fictional meltdown culminates in him threatening to destroy Remick’s career over a note about a boring motel sequence, which he eventually agrees to cut, after humiliating Matt in front of the entire office. It’s savage and hilarious scene.
Then came Sarah Polley, who hadn’t acted in over 15 years before appearing in the show’s one-take episode, “The Oner.”
She plays a version of herself desperately trying to land a complicated tracking shot at sunset, only for Seth Rogen’s character to keep screwing it up. According to Gregory, Rogen had a gut feeling Polley would be perfect for it, and he was right:
“Well, Sarah Polley had worked with Seth, and so Seth knew her and just said, ‘Sarah is such a funny person. I just know she would be good at this.’ She retired from acting, but he just asked her, I think as a friend, and she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I think, I think that could be fun.’
“My God, did she kill it. So it was just a gut sense that she would be right for the part, and she was just so great.”
Watching Polley unravel in real time as her precious sunset shot gets derailed by minor disasters is one of the season’s comedic highlights so far and it works because she leans into the chaos with total commitment.
And finally, there’s Olivia Wilde in the noir-flavored episode, “The Missing Reel,” which sees Wilde playing a diva auteur who literally steals her own film reel because she’s unhappy with a scene. The twist? She’s the villain. Gregory explained:
“A lot of it is that you have to know that the director can also act, and so actors who direct are natural fits for this, and there are a lot of them out there. Olivia Wilde was perfect for that.
“I thought it was really cool that she he was doing this noir thing just was all in on it. Again she got the joke. She knew that she was going to be cast as a pain in the ass, auteur director making everyone miserable, and she was down for it. I thought that was really, really cool.”
Wilde goes full maniac, destroying the reel and sending Rogen’s character scrambling to sell his million-dollar car to Zac Efron in order to fund reshoots. It’s the kind of gag that only lands because Wilde commits to being the worst version of herself imaginable, and you can tell she’s loving every second.
With five episodes down and five more to go, The Studio has set a high bar for celebrity self-parody. I’m excited to see what also is in store as the series continues!