‘The Studio’ Guest Stars Anthony Mackie, Zoë Kravitz and Dave Franco on Playing Twisted Versions of Themselves: ‘The Crazier You Get, the Better’
To build the world of “The Studio,” Apple TV+’s satirical send-up about embattled executives at a legacy Hollywood movie studio, Seth Rogen always knew he needed to enlist a slew of A-listers to play themselves.
“We put a lot of pressure on populating the show with the type of people that studio executives would actually be hoping to impress, or hoping to work with,” he says. “But then the writing, as we started to make the actual episodes, started to call on people who had incredibly specific roles within the industry and often had a specific persona that we were going to either play into or against within the industry.”
Case in point: For “The Note,” the writers needed a legendary director — with a “nice guy” persona — who had a two-decade-old movie with a twist ending that Rogen’s Matt Remick had foolishly tried to cut as a young exec. Ron Howard, who won a best director Oscar for 2001’s “A Beautiful Mind,” fit the bill. (In the show, Howard directs an overlong New York gangster movie starring Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco.)
At first, rather than sending scripts directly to potential guest stars, Rogen and show co-creator Evan Goldberg met with everyone individually. Although they had a “rough idea” for each episode, Rogen says his writers’ room would use those initial conversations to glean “how willing” the actors “were to push their personas.”
“The most important deciding factor for anyone, as they were weighing whether or not they wanted to be on our show, was: ‘Will I get to be funny?’” says Rogen. The actors playing themselves “wanted to get to participate in the hard comedy of the show. Once we realized that, we really leaned into it and worked to make these guest stars really drive the comedy.”
For Zoë Kravitz, initially slated to play a “more psychotic” version of herself in “The Golden Globes” episode, but was then asked to return for the drug-fueled, two-part Las Vegas finale, “The Studio” represented a dramatic departure from the darker roles that have defined her body of work. “People think I’m a little bit more serious than I am, and I haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of comedy,” she says. “I know that people see me a certain way — the word ‘cool’ is used a lot. I was really excited to lean into that as much as possible, and then break that down and be as childlike and as silly [as possible], and to use people’s expectations to help the performance.”
Rogen and Goldberg are ideal collaborators for actors, thanks to their encouragement of improvisation. Franco ad-libbed an explicit reference to his “Now You See Me” films, which then became a running gag in the last two episodes. Kravitz, who took a small amount of mushrooms two weeks before shooting the finale, came up with a bunch of lines that captured the “perspective shift” that occurs after getting high.
The writers were particularly keen to dial up Mackie’s penchant for light-hearted jokes and Franco’s naturally optimistic nature to the point of “toxic positivity,” but both actors insist that they are nothing like their fictional counterparts in real life. “That said, when you’re playing yourself, the crazier you get, the better,” says Franco. “I have no ego about any of this. I just want to make myself look like a complete idiot. When I’m working with Seth and Evan, I feel so safe and protected. I feel liberated to take huge swings knowing that they will reel me in if I ever go too far. But more often than not, they just keep pushing me further and further, and that’s when you get some of this really wacky, fun stuff.”
Mackie and Franco think they’ll likely lose in their Emmy category to Howard or Martin Scorsese, who appears in the pilot. But Mackie jokingly sees a potential upside: “[They] are going to cancel each other out, so whichever one doesn’t win is going to fall to third place — and I’ll be in second place. It’s funny to me to think that I could beat one of them by losing to one of them. I’m very excited to see which one of them it might be, because they’re going to have to live with that forever.”
“We put a lot of pressure on populating the show with the type of people that studio executives would actually be hoping to impress, or hoping to work with,” he says. “But then the writing, as we started to make the actual episodes, started to call on people who had incredibly specific roles within the industry and often had a specific persona that we were going to either play into or against within the industry.”
Case in point: For “The Note,” the writers needed a legendary director — with a “nice guy” persona — who had a two-decade-old movie with a twist ending that Rogen’s Matt Remick had foolishly tried to cut as a young exec. Ron Howard, who won a best director Oscar for 2001’s “A Beautiful Mind,” fit the bill. (In the show, Howard directs an overlong New York gangster movie starring Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco.)
At first, rather than sending scripts directly to potential guest stars, Rogen and show co-creator Evan Goldberg met with everyone individually. Although they had a “rough idea” for each episode, Rogen says his writers’ room would use those initial conversations to glean “how willing” the actors “were to push their personas.”
“The most important deciding factor for anyone, as they were weighing whether or not they wanted to be on our show, was: ‘Will I get to be funny?’” says Rogen. The actors playing themselves “wanted to get to participate in the hard comedy of the show. Once we realized that, we really leaned into it and worked to make these guest stars really drive the comedy.”
For Zoë Kravitz, initially slated to play a “more psychotic” version of herself in “The Golden Globes” episode, but was then asked to return for the drug-fueled, two-part Las Vegas finale, “The Studio” represented a dramatic departure from the darker roles that have defined her body of work. “People think I’m a little bit more serious than I am, and I haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of comedy,” she says. “I know that people see me a certain way — the word ‘cool’ is used a lot. I was really excited to lean into that as much as possible, and then break that down and be as childlike and as silly [as possible], and to use people’s expectations to help the performance.”
Rogen and Goldberg are ideal collaborators for actors, thanks to their encouragement of improvisation. Franco ad-libbed an explicit reference to his “Now You See Me” films, which then became a running gag in the last two episodes. Kravitz, who took a small amount of mushrooms two weeks before shooting the finale, came up with a bunch of lines that captured the “perspective shift” that occurs after getting high.
The writers were particularly keen to dial up Mackie’s penchant for light-hearted jokes and Franco’s naturally optimistic nature to the point of “toxic positivity,” but both actors insist that they are nothing like their fictional counterparts in real life. “That said, when you’re playing yourself, the crazier you get, the better,” says Franco. “I have no ego about any of this. I just want to make myself look like a complete idiot. When I’m working with Seth and Evan, I feel so safe and protected. I feel liberated to take huge swings knowing that they will reel me in if I ever go too far. But more often than not, they just keep pushing me further and further, and that’s when you get some of this really wacky, fun stuff.”
Mackie and Franco think they’ll likely lose in their Emmy category to Howard or Martin Scorsese, who appears in the pilot. But Mackie jokingly sees a potential upside: “[They] are going to cancel each other out, so whichever one doesn’t win is going to fall to third place — and I’ll be in second place. It’s funny to me to think that I could beat one of them by losing to one of them. I’m very excited to see which one of them it might be, because they’re going to have to live with that forever.”