With an entertainment empire that now includes The boys, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Invincibleand dozens of well-known comedy projects, Seth Rogen has quietly become something of a mini-mogul — and now he’s channeling his experience into a Hollywood TV show that’s both deeply personal and ridiculously satirical.
Rogen plays rising executive Matt Remick in The Workshopa 10-episode series for Apple TV+ of which he also co-created, produced and co-directed each episode. Over the course of the series, Matt struggles to support filmmakers and actors he admires while stressing over his company’s bottom line – a constant pressure that haunts every executive as Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg I know it personally.
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“Evan and I always cite a meeting we had early on, where a studio executive said literally what Matt says in the pilot,” Rogen said. Weekly Entertainment. “He would give us notes and he would put his head down and say, ‘I did this job because I love movies, and now my job is to ruin them,’ and the more we started talking about that, we say: this is very tragic and sad and intrinsically very comical in many ways.
Rogen’s desire to do a personal project began while he was starring in Steven Spielbergthe autobiographical film of The Fabelmans. “I was really taken with the way Steven told this story,” he recalls. “And at the same time, it was kind of during the pandemic and I had just gotten back to watching The Larry Sanders Show, which I haven’t watched in a long time. And I started thinking that it would be really fun to make a TV show that was really personal and talked about my everyday experience. So I just started thinking, “What would be my version of this type of show?” » Something that’s really based on my own experiences, my own interests, and my own everyday life, but hopefully something that has enough appeal and interest that the average person who isn’t I appreciate it.”
Rogen and Goldberg have assembled an all-star cast to populate their fictional continental studios, including Catherine O’Hara as a disgraced executive producer, Brian Cranston as a mysteriously cowardly corporate overlord, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders as the dueling small-time leaders vying for power, and, in perhaps the funniest recurring role, Catherine Hahn as a frantic and crude marketer.
After leading Marvel Agathe throughoutThe actress told EW she’s eager to take on another comedic supporting role, like the ones she initially built her career on in projects like Half-brothers And Parks and Recreation. “Agatha “It was one of the most important experiences, but there was something nostalgic about jumping into something like that,” she says. “That’s how I got started in comedy in this business, I was in these huge big ensembles and these juicy supporting roles. I didn’t realize how much I needed it. It was so medicinal to be a player passing the ball, impressed by people’s performances.”
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Hahn says she based her character on a number of real Hollywood businesswomen she’s met over the years. “I can’t even pronounce their names, but there are a lot of birds that inspired her, a lot of amazing women in this town who just have a daughter in Saks,” she says. “They come from an era where you really had to act like a guy to stay in the game and have this kind of patriarchal vibe, ‘you have to follow the kind of vibe of all the guys’. There’s a desperation incredible calm in her for which I had a lot of empathy.
Although the series presents him in a rather unflattering light, Rogen also expresses a similar empathy for his character. “I’ve made friends with a lot of these kinds of people over the years: I’ve been to their weddings, I go to their birthday parties, and I’ve seen that a lot of them like movies as much as we do,” he explains. “But they unfortunately find themselves at this inflection point between art and commerce, and they are almost daily put in a position where they have to choose between self-preservation and creative freedom. It’s something that I personally identify sometimes as a person (who) produces a lot of things and is, in some way, financially and logistically responsible for making those things.
He continues: “There are many times in my life where I’ve asked myself, ‘Am I making these things worse? Am I making them better? Am I the guy who tells people not to do what they really want because they don’t?’ Is this logistically feasible or is it beyond the scope of our budgets and timelines?
Rogen and Goldberg set themselves a huge directing challenge: Each scene in the series is a single scene – one long, uninterrupted take (or, at least, without any visible cuts between shots, as many modern scenes are stitched together in a transparent from smaller pieces). “Even though it’s not a continuous period, we really like condensed timelines,” he explains. “We like things to happen almost in real time. It felt like it captured that kind of panicked, frantic tone that we were going for because the camera never settles into a pattern. And I think because of of that, it kind of keeps you on edge and you’re never quite centered or comfortable.
Hahn was stunned by this stylistic choice. “It was so ambitious and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to do this,’” she recalls. “Some scenes were very long and involved a lot of human beings, so we rehearsed each scene like a play. We just rehearsed it and rehearsed and rehearsed, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, we’re I’m never going to move forward.'”
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But pulling off everyone’s seemingly impossible magic trick brought incredible satisfaction. “When the band finally started working and the beat was there and you knew where the camera was and everyone was dancing together in the scene, it was so exhilarating,” Hahn says. “The atmosphere was so good. This kind of environment is my favorite – it was a very generous setting.”
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Rogen hopes the show’s technical wizardry will demonstrate the value of wild stylistic shifts in comedies in general. “I think in action movies people get the lead, and in dramas people get the lead, but in comedy it’s not something people look for so often,” says -he. “And so for us, it was also an exciting way to do comedy in a way that was unique and trying to find our way into this category where it was like, ‘No, this deserves this type of attention .’ It shouldn’t just be reserved for stunts and emotional upheavals. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing comedy performed live, so we’ve emphasized the actual timing – we’re not manipulating any of that, that’s it. is behind closed doors.
Hahn believes the series captures the endless anxiety of the contemporary entertainment industry. “There’s this constant threat of, ‘Is my job going to disappear tomorrow?’, and also, ‘Does what I’m doing make sense? Is this what I started to believe in? Did I become the cynic I didn’t want to be when I was in my 20s?'” she says. “There’s so much to this show. And It’s so hilarious.”
The Workshop launches its first two episodes on March 26 on Apple TV+.