Too Many Filmmakers Now Want To Be In Apple’s The Studio

Seth Rogen’s Emmy success with The Studio has led to an unexpected problem. “I’m having to actually turn down directors I’m a big fan of.”

The Studio, it should be noted, is fucking great. The Apple TV+ series is a razor sharp satire of the movie industry written for cineastes, and that alone would have had me tuning in, at least, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a loneliness to co-creator and star Seth Rogen‘s studio head, Matt Remick, that offsets the very real risk that the entire exercise might have descended into a grating sideshow of celebs huffing each others farts in an attempt to prove that They Can Take A Joke Too; a palpable sense that, as a suit, he’ll always be walled off from the creators that he so clearly loves and yearns to be. It’s an important detail that makes the series genuinely brilliant instead of very, very good.

But unlike his on-screen character, Rogen is in no danger of being lonely. In a huge interview with GQ, Rogen explained that while he and his colleagues experienced a few hassles getting celebs to play themselves in the satirical series, they’re now beating down the door to pitch cameo ideas at him. there’s a fair chance that has a lot to do with the show having scooped up an impressive 13 statues at this year’s Emmy Awards (Roges himself scored four).

“I had a few people come up to me at the Emmys saying they regret it,” he says. “Which was very meaningful to me. That’s all I want – for people to regret not working with me.

““It’s gotten very meta. It does feel like I’m running a fake movie studio at times,” he goes on to say. “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.”

There’s been no word of who Rogen has said yes to for The Studio‘s upcoming second season, but the show will return to Apple TV+ at some as yet unspecified future date.