Seth Rogen’s new TV show will lift the lid on Hollywood

In the new Apple TV+ series The Studio, young Hollywood mogul Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) strides cockily between meetings with Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and a raft of other real-life A-listers who agreed to play themselves in this wild showbiz satire.

Getting them there is in some ways testament to the friendships Rogen has built over more than 25 years in Hollywood. People like him. People trust him. And in The Studio he seems to have parlayed both, coupled with stunning writing, into a show for which cultural historians are already clearing shelf space.

Seth Rogen as Matt Remick in The Studio.Credit: Apple TV+

But behind the series’ journey from script to screen is a friendship that predates all of that: Rogen’s friendship with the show’s co-creator, Evan Goldberg, which dates back to Point Grey, the middle school they attended in Vancouver, Canada, and whose name they have borrowed to christen their production company.

“It keeps you grounded in many ways if you are friends with the people you grew up with,” Rogen says. “A lot of my friends have different jobs, living in different places, and they are not in this career at all. It is a good touchstone.”

Rogen, 42, says those friendships pay interest with honesty. “They’re like, I saw you say this thing in an interview, you sound f---ing crazy, what are you doing? Don’t do that. Which is very helpful, I think, in a lot of ways. It creates a system of checks and balances that is helpful to me personally.”

The Studio, which Rogen and Goldberg created with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, is set behind the gates of Continental Studios, a fictional entity wedged narratively in between better-known, real-life film studios like Paramount, Warner Bros and Universal.

The action is frenetic, the cameos wild - everyone from Zac Efron, Zoë Kravitz and Charlize Theron to Steve Buscemi and Greta Lee make an appearance in the 10 episodes - and the situations ridiculous enough to leave the whole thing teetering on the brink of plausible.

In the midst of the chaos, Matt’s predecessor - played by Catherine O’Hara, one of the few A-list names not playing herself - is ousted and studio chairman Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) decides the time has come for Matt Remick to lead the business.

The Studio stars Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Rogen and Chase Sui Wonders.Credit: Getty Images for IMDb

Mill is hungry for the next big thing: in this case, a commerce-to-art Barbie knock-off based on the iconic American brand Kool-Aid. Enter Scorsese, who has in mind a film based on the Jonestown massacre, in which a group of cultists took their own lives by drinking tainted cordial. Remick cynically sees an opportunity.

“We wanted to take the filmmaking side of it very seriously,” Rogen explains. “While the show as a whole is satirising elements of Hollywood and a lot of the personalities involved with Hollywood, we didn’t want to try to sell the audience on any suspension of disbelief when it came to the actual nuts and bolts of how the industry worked, the people who were involved in the projects, and the ideas themselves.”

It is oddly reminiscent of the TV series Entourage, which also set out to unpick Hollywood’s foibles, using the development of an Aquaman film as its set dressing. At the time, it was intended to gently mock the idea that a B-tier superhero would be an unlikely headliner in a world ruled by Superman and Batman. Since then, however, actor Jason Momoa has turned Aquaman into a blue-chip movie asset.

Rogen found confirmation of his belief from an unexpected source: the television series The Bear. “We kept referencing that; they seem to take the food side of it very seriously,” Rogen says. “When it came to the Kool-Aid pitch, and we worked really hard on coming up with the best version of that movie, and what the version that would make a studio person buy it [might look like].”

The series concept seems to bounce through pop culture history, coming close to a handful of very different approaches to the same material. The Player, directed by Robert Altman, is the film often wheeled out as the best satire on the business of showbusiness.

There are other unexpected stopovers: Fat Actress, starring Kirstie Alley, which was an underrated masterpiece, and more recently, the critically exalted comedy 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a New York-based comedy show.

Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara in a scene from The Studio.Credit: Apple TV+

But all roads lead back to Rogen’s friendship with Goldberg and the TV show they have been obsessed with since they were kids: The Larry Sanders Show, which starred writer/creator Garry Shandling as talk show host Larry Sanders, Rip Torn as his producer Artie and Jeffrey Tambor as sidekick Hank Kingsley.

“We were obsessed with it, and we loved the meta quality of it,” Rogen says. “We loved seeing people we know. It really felt like a real look behind the curtain. I loved Letterman and Conan, so the idea of really getting to see what it was like to be in one of those environments [was appealing]. The people really were who they were, which I thought was very funny.”

During the pandemic, locked in his house, Rogen re-watched Larry Sanders. So while there is inspiration for The Studio to be found everywhere, it was Rogen and Golberg’s unwavering passion for Larry Sanders that made them pull the trigger.

“We love all those things, but it’s really The Larry Sanders Show. That’s the target that we were trying to hit in a lot of ways,” Rogen says. “For me as a performer, it was something I had talked a lot about, to try and come up with a character that is inherently comedic the way that the Larry Sanders character is.”

With Larry, “he’s a talk show host, but he doesn’t want to talk to anybody basically, and he hates attention, but he needs attention, all these conflicts,” Rogen says. “So, [with Matt Remick] we started talking about this idea of someone who loves movies, but who has to ruin them, and who loves famous people, but has to disappoint them, and f--- them over.”

Martin Scorsese joins Ike Barinholtz and Seth Rogen in The Studio.Credit: Apple TV+

That’s where the cameos come in - all those disappointed famous people mentioned above, plus Ramy Youssef, Anthony Mackie, Adam Scott, Johnny Knoxville and more. But Scorsese - the most extraordinary of those- was not the result of an old favour called in. Neither Rogen nor Goldberg were friends with him; instead, they simply wrote him a part he could not turn down.

“Some people just don’t want to do it, and some people just can’t wrap their heads around playing themselves, and it’s a non-starter, but I think a lot of people are very open to playing themselves,” Rogen says. “They just want to be funny. They just want good jokes and they want good scenes.

“What we found more than anything was that people are willing to satirise themselves and how they fit into the industry and how they’re viewed and what is expected of them, but they just want the scenes to be good, and they don’t want to feel like they are window-dressing,” Rogen adds. “Even if they have one line in the scene, they want it to be a good line, they want to feel like they have a moment.”

Bryan Cranston plays the grotesque Griffin Mill.Credit: Apple TV+

Equally, the series leans into the jadedness of the business itself. Bryan Cranston’s studio boss Griffin Mill is so grotesque that he is barely a parody. There are hundreds of Griffin Mills in LA. And Kathryn Hahn’s head of marketing, Maya, is one of those Edina Monsoon-esque creations so rampantly mad that she must be half-great writing, half-improvised chaos.

Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen star in the Hollywood satire The Studio.Credit: Apple TV+

At one point, a character even quips “I’m 30 years too late for this industry”, which seems to tap that pervading fear in Hollywood that the best years are behind them. “To us, that was always the conversation that was very inspirational in terms of the creation of the show,” says Rogen. “Art versus commerce and how the people at the studios are literally at the inflection point of those two things, and every day faced with choices as to which one of those masters to serve.

“These people do love movies, a lot of them, and they wish they could be choosing art every time, but if they did, their careers just wouldn’t last very long,” Rogen adds. “Or maybe they would, but at least in their heads have to appear to be people who are mitigating risk and not being frivolous in their choices and their spending.”

Even an experience like Rogen’s – where a studio bought his first film Superbad, “without a big cast attached, and they would develop it and then hire a director and hire a cast and actually put it together and then promote it as a comedy with relatively unknown people” – is something many would imagine being in Hollywood’s rearview mirror. Hollywood in 2025 is streaming algorithms, marketing strategies and commercial cross-promotions.

Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Rogen and Chase Sui Wonders in The Studio.Credit: Apple TV+

And yet, none of that dampens Rogen’s enthusiasm. For his new series. For his production company, and its slate, which includes The Boys, its spin-offs Gen V and Diabolical, and Robert Kirkman’s Invincible for Amazon, Platonic for Apple TV+ and others. Or even for Hollywood itself.

“I personally have a lot of fear,” Rogen says. “Even with the show, it’s like, I convinced all these famous people to do the show. I want it to be good. I have the same fear of letting down my heroes, which is something that I really thought was interesting, and a funny conundrum that I find myself in often.

“This idea that I have a production company, we produce tons of stuff, and I have to give notes to people ... at times I [ask], am I making this worse? Am I helping? Am I imposing my vision on this thing or am I allowing this person to do a thing that maybe I don’t understand? And maybe that’s OK.”

So, who is the real Seth Rogen? By all accounts in Los Angeles, he’s a nice guy. People who know him well say he’s a great example of being successful in Hollywood without being ruled by your own ego. If Matt Remick is a reflection of him, maybe he’s also idealistic but riven with ambitious insecurities. Or does the truth of the man sit somewhere in between?

“I bet some of the executives I’ve worked with over the years, some of the marketing departments ... they might have some different thoughts about me and how it feels to interact with me,” Rogen says, smiling. “I’m very passionate. I really do have strong feelings, and I try not to be an asshole for sure. And especially when I’m on set working, I’m generally in a great mood because we’ve done it, we’re there. I’m where I want to be with the people I want to be with.

“But I do think that part of our success, me and Evan, is because we know the battles to choose, and we do fight battles, and we fight them hard. And there are many people I would imagine who fear the impending battles between me and Evan and them, and I have several swords to wield because I have several hats I wear and I know how and when to wield them the most effectively.”

Putting himself out there, and his reputation on the line, he says, is “the most effective way for me to do it on many levels,” Rogen says. “I inherently will work harder on it if it’s very personal to me. I will try to make it better if it’s very personal to me. I won’t be annoyed by how long it takes to make a lot of these things if it’s very personal to me.

“I read interviews with myself sometimes, and that isn’t an expression of who I am in near as thorough a way as a show like The Studio is,” Rogen adds. “You know much more about me after watching The Studio than you will after doing this interview.

“That is a real exploration of the things that I’m afraid of, the things that I worry about, the worst version of how I view myself, my deepest fears of how my interactions with people come across, and how they talk about me if I’m not around.”

The Studio is on Apple TV+ from March 26.