Seth Rogen on taking big swings with ‘The Studio’: ‘Are people just going to think this looks insane?’

No one is more surprised at the success of The Studio than its cocreator Seth Rogen.

After all, he and his cocreator, Evan Goldberg, set an impossibly high bar for themselves — skewering the very industry they live and thrive in.

“I did have a hyper awareness that a lot of the people I'd be interacting with professionally would probably see this, and if it was bad, it would be incredibly unpleasant for me to constantly be interacting with people that I knew thought I had failed,” Rogen tells Gold Derby. “That did weigh on me, and it was something that I was aware of and something that did add pressure to the entire experience of it.”

Thankfully, they did stick the landing — the eight-episode series of the Apple TV+ comedy scored with audiences, and sits atop Gold Derby’s prediction charts across multiple categories, including Best Comedy Series, Lead Actor (for Rogen), Supporting Actress Catherine O’Hara and Supporting Actor Ike Barinholtz — not to mention its guest cast, including Bryan Cranston, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and Zoë Kravitz.

Here, Rogen shares why he and Goldberg took so many big swings creatively, who said yes first (Scorsese), why nothing was left on the cutting room floor, and what’s on the board for Season 2.

Gold Derby: So I was going to joke about you wearing many hats for this series, and you are literally wearing a hat.

Seth Rogen: I'm only wearing one single hat at this moment.

Thank you for showing up dressed for my first question: Actor, writer, director, showrunner — how do you juggle all of your roles on The Studio?

It's funny, because to me, there are times where they are in conflict with one another, but in general, they are not. And when they're not, it feels like one seamless job. It doesn't feel like I am having to shift gears between acting and writing and producing and directing. It honestly just feels like I'm making a thing with my good friend and in doing that, there's a very fluid process in place. As I'm acting, I'm also directing the scenes in a very subtle way, and I'm also rewriting the scene sometimes. And so to me, I actually think I feel the most comfortable when I'm doing all those things. It’s almost harder for me when I have been regimented to just one of those things, and that's when I start to feel, at times, a little bit more of the friction between the jobs.

What has surprised you the most about people's response to the show?

Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but I don't take for granted anyone ever liking anything we do. I have been completely blindsided many times in my career where I really think I've done something everyone's going to respond to, and they just don't. And I've also made things that I don't think people are going to respond to that much, and they do, which is a pattern that always keeps me a little bit on edge, honestly. So I was just really happy people liked it, and that it seemed to resonate with people also outside of our industry. My wife's friends from Central Florida are staying with us right now, and they love the show, so that's been really rewarding. I was honestly very concerned that stylistically, we were taking a swing that would not resonate with people, and I was very happy and somewhat surprised, honestly, that it seemed to land in the exact way we hoped it would. Which, again, is not something I take for granted.

Talk about those stylistic choices you made. Do you mean the shooting style, the episodic nature, the retro look and feel, all of the above?

All of it, the choice to not make it incredibly serialized, from the writing to the directing. We made choices that go somewhat against my comfort zone in a lot of ways, very deliberately in almost every capacity, like the choice to make it very episodic, the choice to only give it one storyline. The idea that we only ever wanted to be a single propulsive story was something that I was very nervous about, honestly, because it just wasn't the trend of streaming comedy.

SEE Seth Rogen explains how ‘The Studio’ pulled off its one-shot episode

So why did you make that choice?

I just thought it was exciting. That idea of self-contained great episodes of television is something that I feel a lot of nostalgia for. I still remember when I was a kid and “The Contest” episode of Seinfeld was one that everyone was talking about. The idea of trying to create that type of conversation around the show was just something that Igrew up with and that I was missing a little bit. And then the idea to give it such a strong look — the design of the building, I was very nervous about. It was such a big swing. As we were shooting in these offices, I was worried, are people just going to think this looks insane? The reasoning behind it was all very sound, but I just wasn't 100 percent sure that it would necessarily land. It was great to really push myself out of my comfort zone, but it was also very uncomfortable at times.

And then there's the oner shooting style, too.

Exactly And that, again, was for comedy —  so different and so nerve-wracking and so against what we had been taught and the school of comedy that we came up in, which was find it in editing, in the rhythms you can refine editorially. We were stripping ourselves of all that which was, again, very exciting, but it was just so different that I had no reason to believe it would land other than my hope and projected vision with Evan. We never committed as hard to having as specific a style directorially as we did as writers. And this was really in many ways, our first deliberate attempt to give our directing style as specific a voice as our writing style.

You also set a pretty high bar for yourselves in terms of the casting. Who was the first person to say yes?

Sarah Polley was actually the first person we went out to, way before we were making the show. And the main cast was very good, like Catherine O'Hara and Kathryn Hahn. Honestly, people were just very excited to be on a show that Catherine O'Hara is on. Scorsese came on relatively early in the process as well. Getting him early on in the process — that added a legitimacy to the whole thing that that put a lot of people at ease. They knew they weren't going to be the person putting themselves out there the most, with the highest stature in the industry. He gave us an amazing gift that we in no way deserved from him, necessarily. It solidified the show in a way that no one else could have done for us.

Have you gotten any regrets from the people that said no?

Yes, a couple. It's been very gratifying, I'll be honest. Yes, I've had a few emails from people that were like, “Oh sh-t, I should have done it.”

How did you pick what topics you were going to do episodes around, and what was left on the cutting-room floor?

What's interesting was the way we shoot the show, nothing was done on the cutting-room floor. I think there's maybe one 30-second scene that we shot that we cut out of the show, and literally, everything else we shot is in the show, We’re all very hard on the writing process. I really have a philosophy of if you find yourself cutting a lot of stuff, you do not write it well enough. I actually work very hard to structure things in a way where you can’t cut a scene, because if you do, the whole piece doesn't make sense anymore. If you're structuring things in the right way, then every scene is leading to the next scene and building to the next scene. And so you shouldn't be giving yourself the opportunity to cut anything. There's no shortage of ideas to explore within the industry. The only limitation is our ability to turn it into an episode that stylistically fits into the show we are making, which is incredibly condensed, pressurized, high stakes explorations of singular ideas. I'm looking at a board of ideas [turns camera to show a storyboard with index cards] — we could have an idea about a bidding war, and it happens all the time in Hollywood, and it's something we've experienced, but what is the 30-minute story that is an exploration of a bidding war that is one singular story that's high stakes, that is inherently comedic, that has true opportunity for real comedic highs and incredible visceral moments, and hopefully maybe even physical comedy and slapstick. It's purely based on our ability to turn these ideas into episodes.

So the awards campaign episode — that will happen next season?

We've been talking a lot about it, honestly — film festivals, the standing ovations. We have a lot to crack. 

Looking back over the course of the season, what was the toughest episode to pull off? What episode are you proudest of?

The Vegas stuff was hard, but to me, the Golden Globes one was the one I was most proud of. We had an incredibly specific vision for it in in every way, and the vision was incredibly complicated — we just had to shoot it at the Beverly Hilton. And that was incredibly restrictive and logistically difficult. I wanted there to be never a suspension in disbelief in the caliber of celebrity you were seeing — that's not who'd be winning a Golden Globe, that's not who'd be hosting the Golden Globes, that's not who'd be getting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes, that's not who'd be presenting at the Golden Globes. And so given that that was our self-imposed mandate, pulling off an award show was incredibly difficult, and getting that amount of cameos to show up in that time frame was incredibly difficult. It was also the first time that we were really using our oner shooting style in an environment with so many people. A lot of the episodes are pretty contained — maybe 30, 40 people in some scenes. But this, every scene had 500 people in it, and so we instantly saw, oh, the resets take so much longer, and so much more can go wrong. And even though very few people have been to the Golden Globes, and ever will go to the Golden Globes, very few people will understand the lengths I went through to obtain this. I just wanted it to feel like you were there. And when I watch it, to me, it really feels like what it feels like to be at the Golden Globes, and I'm very proud that I was able to do that.

SEE 'Is that about me?' Seth Rogen loves how 'The Studio' keeps Hollywood guessing

How many notes have you gotten from the industry for Season 2?

We’ve gotten a lot of ideas sent to us, which is great. It's so nice that people are pitching ideas to us, and there's no shortage of ideas. Can we take these great ideas that people are bringing us and actually turn it into an episode of the show is always the question.

What’s the worst idea you've gotten?

What's funny is, we've gotten calls from some studio heads who love the show and are giving us ideas, but they're also just giving us notes on the show that Matt just get over himself. Like, if he just didn’t such an ego about this, he'd be much better at his job. And it's like, that's not a good note for the show. That is the show. I get as a studio head that would probably make it better, but comedically, that would hurt the show, not help it.