Here’s A Look Inside The Studio and Its Real Hollywood Cameos
When Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) becomes the new head of Continental Studios, he must balance his passion for prestige film with the realities of making corporate blockbusters. In Apple TV+’s The Studio, the series pulls back the Tinseltown curtains to bring us behind-the-scenes into the magic and chaos of moviemaking. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with creator, co-showrunner, executive producer, and writer Alex Gregory about the can’t miss first season.
The Studio team was heavily inspired by The Larry Sanders Show, which was a fictional late-night show that aired for six seasons starting in 1992. The way they handled cameos was different than what has been done before as they had real talent — like Robin Williams, Drew Barrymore, and Winona Ryder — come in to play heightened versions of themselves. “The Larry Sanders Show informed The Studio in a lot of ways. People talk about the cameos on Larry Sanders. In order to tell an authentic story of a talk show, you have to have real celebrity guests. You can't fake that. You can't have someone pretending to be someone else and have it feel real,” said Gregory, who worked across both shows. “It's the same thing if you're going to tell the story of a movie studio. You have to have authentic cameos.”
“What you see from […] The Larry Sanders Show is that people were willing to have fun and poke fun at themselves. People are, by and large, pretty cool about that sort of stuff as long as they know what the joke is and they know that the tone of the show is not cruel,” Gregory continued. “We're not out to hurt anyone's feelings. It's more a show about how hard it is to make anything good in the business, even with everyone trying their best.”
While Gregory couldn’t divulge his cameo wish list for a potential season 2 (“Because we might be trying to actively get them”), he did share the cameos that surprised him the most in this first season. “The one that delighted me the most was Nick Stoller because Nick had never acted before. He showed up and he's like, ‘I've never done this before,’ and he crushed it,” he revealed. “He was so funny, we just kept bringing him back. To me, Nick Stoller is in some ways the breakout star of all the cameos.”
He feels confident that people had so much fun that they’ll have more people knocking on their doors to join the show. “People just brought it. I mean, Zoë Kravitz just went all out. It was a delight to watch people having fun. If [actors] get a chance to just play and have a great time, they're up for it,” said Gregory. “So I'm hopeful that we [will] have more wonderful cameos next season. I suspect there will be a lot more incoming calls about — if we get a second season — people wanting to be part of it.”
Another highlight of the show is the meta parallels that blur the lines between the corporate drama and the films being produced. “We call it out directly. We love a bookend,” shared Gregory. “The whole thing is a love letter to cinema and so [we did] as many cinematic techniques that we could bring in. [Like] in the episode called ‘The Note’ where they're trying to get Ron Howard to cut his pretentious montage and then we do a pretentious montage. It’s highlighting movie techniques.”
Even though The Studio is a TV show, Gregory remarked on how much further they were able to go in terms of cinematic production. “Seth and Evan Goldberg wanted to throw every cool shot and idea they've ever had into this show because in a movie you don't always get to do it. That's the irony, is that you might have to cut that scene because it didn't test well or this or that,” he explained. “I actually think they had a lot more creative freedom to ‘do cinema,’ even though no one's watching it in a movie theater, in this show. They just blew it out with production design and everything. We wanted every episode to feel like a standalone movie.”
Speaking of the stand out production design, they were able to be very purposeful in the aesthetics of the show to explore Matt’s journey through New and Old Hollywood. “It's all intentional because having this incredible building that's designed by Frank Lloyd Wright adds to the pressure that Matt feels. He feels the pressure of legacy that he could be the guy who brings this all down,” shared Gregory. “While it's beautiful to look at, it's also part of the storytelling of Hollywood [having] this incredible rich history. There's so many beautiful buildings here.”
“You get the sense of there was this great incredible world and how nowadays things are getting diluted and watered down and so you want to get a sense of the past as well as a sense of the present,” Gregory continued. “He's on an iPhone, but he's in an MG, so there is the tug of war at all times. I think that helps the tension of the show between the era where things were made just to be beautiful, whereas now everything needs to be made profitable.”
This first season tackles hot topics like art versus blockbusters, budgets, race, and AI. “There are so many stories left to tell, both big and small,” promises Gregory. “I hope we get a chance to tell them all.”
The Studio is streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes airing Wednesdays.
