The popular comedy series The Studio delves into the nitty gritty of the filmmaking industry, so it’s only appropriate that actors, writers, directors and more creative talent from Hollywood have cameoed as themselves. Examples of this we’ve seen during the show’s run on the 2025 TV schedule include Charlize Theron cameoing just to say one line and Ron Howard playing the “asshole” version of himself. But as it turns out, the lack of availability from certain celebrities also prompted “whole episodes” of The Studio to be outright shelved, which I learned while speaking with executive producers Frida Perez and Peter Huyck.
During this interview, where I also learned why Seth Rogen falls down so much on this Apple TV+ subscription-exclusive show, I was curious about if there were ever instances where someone’s unavailability to play themselves resulted in major story changes for The Studio Season 1. Perez confirmed that this had indeed happened, saying:
Definitely. Like you said, the celebrities are really important to the stories, and we didn't want it to feel like a mad lib of you could just swap someone in and then you could just keep the whole script the same. So we really wrote to every person we cast, and when we when we were writing it, we thought of people and if that didn't work, we would basically rewrite most of it to like really fit the person we were trying to get.
Seth Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg created The Studio with Frida Perez, Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, so between all of them, Rogen and Goldberg in particular, they’re not lacking in ways to recruit massive guest stars. Nevertheless, sometimes schedules just don’t align or there’s a lack of interest from approached parties, necessitating episodes to almost entirely rewritten. I get Perez’s rationale though, if they’d gone all Mad Libs with these episodes, the stories would almost certainly have flowed more weirdly.
Fortunately, that didn’t end up being an issue when director Sarah Polley, who worked with Rogen on the 2011 movie Take This Waltz, played herself in The Studio’s second episode, “The Oner.” As Peter Huyck told me after Perez said her piece:
Yeah, and a lot of instances like in the oner [with] Sarah Polley, that was immediately Seth and Evan’s first hope was that she would be the perfect person to play that director in a set visit episode where Seth's character just ruins take after take. Because Seth had worked with her, and he said she's so much funnier than anyone knows. So to let her come out of the world of the kind of the more dramatic pieces she does and just be so intense and so comedic was perfect. And she was, I think, one of the first people that signed on. And so there are those casting pieces [where] when when they land, it's perfect.
I’m glad it worked out with Sarah Polley, a former actress, as she did an amazing job conveying the frustration of Seth Rogen’s Matt Remick continually ruining her one take shots for her romantic drama. But again, there are times when things just don’t work out and the episodes need to be set aside, although that’s not to say they can’t be revisited if The Studio Season 2 happens. As Huyck added:
But there are other episodes for sure where we were trying for a very specific piece of casting, and if it didn't work, I think we shelved whole episodes because there's literally one or two people, an actor, director, actress in the world who would fit the bill, and if we didn't get them, we would say, ‘Ok, Season 2, we'll try again.’
With three episodes left to go in The Studio Season 1, it’s hard to say if Season 2 is in the cards, although I’d like to think that it stands a strong chance given how many positive reviews the series has received. If that ends up happening, fingers crossed Peter Huyck’s desire to revisit these shelved episodes is fulfilled. If the celebrities who were unable in Season 1 are able to play around in Season 2, why let a good idea just go to waste?
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