In a new interview with GQ, Seth Rogen says he had concerns about how Hollywood would respond to The Studio. Those concerns seem to have been mostly assuaged when the show broke records as the most-awarded comedy series in one night at the 2025 Emmys. “I had a few people come up to me at the Emmys saying they regret” turning down cameos in the first season, “which was very meaningful to me,” Rogen laughed. “That’s all I want—for people to regret not working with me.”
After hustling to convince major players like Martin Scorsese and Sarah Polley (and even scrapping an entire episode because they couldn’t get the right cameos), Rogen and co. now have the opposite problem. “It’s gotten very meta. It does feel like I’m running a fake movie studio at times,” he explained. “I’m having directors’ agents call me to pitch their clients to be the directors of fake movies on our show, which is very weird and very meta. And I’m having to actually turn down directors I’m a big fan of because the movie, the fake movie, maybe isn’t quite right for the fake package we have in our heads. So yeah—it’s gotten very strange.”
Rogen thinks the industry has embraced the show because it feels “very real” to them, but he was “actually quite worried about” how it would be received before the premiere. “When you make a thing that’s about a very specific industry, that industry historically is going to be very critical of it and very hard on it and hold it up against their own lens and their own standards of reality,” he said. “I make a lot of things where I’m like: ‘Steven Spielberg‘s not going to watch this.’ This was a thing where I’m like: ‘Oh no, I feel like these people who I really look up to will probably at least check it out.’ And so that was something that really kept me up at night a few weeks, just knowing the people I really thought would actually watch the show, at least out of curiosity, were the people that I most respect and am the most craving [of] their validation.” Four personal Emmys and 13 total for The Studio‘s first season is probably enough validation to last a lifetime.
- The Studio is as much about the art of falling as that of filmmaking
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