Seth Rogen And Evan Goldberg‘s Apple TV+ show The Studio is top of the comedy tree right now with a whopping 23 Emmy nominations – among them, best comedy series, lead actor in a comedy for Rogen, writing, and multiple guest star nominations, including Ron Howard, in the director’s first ever Emmy nom.
Following Tuesday morning’s nominations announcement, Rogen, Goldberg and Howard chatted to Deadline about the show’s impact and their hopes for what will come in Season 2 of the show following the calamitous career of studio head Matt Remick (Rogen).
A hallmark of The Studio is its laundry list of big-name guest stars, from Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese, to Olivia Wilde, Zac Efron, Ice Cube and Sarah Polley.
“My biggest fear is people are just going to be humiliated in the wake of working with us,” said Rogen, “so I think the fact that so many of our guest stars got these nominations is so thrilling because it mostly makes me feel like they didn’t waste their time by doing our show.”
Going forward, given the success of the show, Rogen and Goldberg hope that signing up starry guest stars may be a little easier, although they have not yet landed one they had their eye on: Daniel Day-Lewis. “We haven’t locked him in just yet,” laughed Rogen.
However, they have snagged Polley as a writer on the show for Season 2. “We walked out the writers room to come do this [interview],” Rogen said. “She’s working on the show with us as a writer of this season, it’s really great. We’re still figuring it all out. We have a lot of ideas and we are currently in the midst of trying to reach out to some big guest stars who would have potentially significant roles in some of the episodes. But this makes me just feel immense pressure and stress for the most part.”
Asked how they planned to up the ante for the second season, Goldberg said, “Fortunately, the more pressure in our real careers and the more things that happen to us, the more it’s fed into the studio system, our studio system. So we just had more fodder, every time things happened, and now the nominations – we’ll make some joke about that.”
While speculation has been rife about which real-life people the characters might be based upon, Goldberg said that most people who’d approached them on the topic had it all wrong. “The funny thing is the people who things are somewhat based on seem not to be aware, and the people who things are in no way based on, think it’s entirely based on them.”
In Season 1, Ron Howard was the first famous name guest star to sign on. He immediately loved the writing. “It is so well written,” he said. “They do a lot of improv and stuff, but basically, it’s there. It a little bit reminds me of the Arrested Development scripts. The actors had a lot of latitude to play and sometimes they came up with great bits, but it was foundationally hilarious and sharp. And I think that’s the way the script was for The Studio.”
Howard wanted to dig into the role. “I know I do a lot of these cameos where I play myself, whether it’s Arrested Development or or Only Murders in the Building. I said, ‘Those are cameos and I don’t always really like myself in them when I see them.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be cameo good, I want to be actually good.’ And so I said, ‘Who’s directing?’ And they said, ‘We are.’ And I said, ‘OK, crack the whip.’ Well, it turns out I really loved the material, worked very hard on it and they didn’t have to crack the whip.”
Howard said he would happily return for Season 2. “If I could possibly do another season, I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said. “The whole thing was just kind of a gift. I felt like my three days acting there was kind of a vacation. Evan and Seth had to make all the difficult decisions and I just got to play a jerk for three days and with a brilliant cast and have a lot of laughs. So it was a lot of fun.”
Howard also said that his character throwing a hat at Rogen was his idea. “I tried it in rehearsal and everybody laughed, and especially Seth with his big guffaw, and they said, ‘Keep it in.’ By the time we rehearsed it and shot it a number of times to make ‘the oner’ work, he probably got pounded in the head about 15 or 20 times. I didn’t go easy on him either. I fired that sucker square in his face.”
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