“The best note was when I threw my hat,” recalled Ron Howard, actor-turned-filmmaker-newly-turned-actor again for a hilarious guest stint on The Studio, in which Seth Rogen’s studio head Matt Remick is terrified to give the oft-baseball-capped Howard a harsh note on his film, fearing a fire-breathing response from the publicly genial director.
On set, in fact, the real Howard was open to every note he could get from series creators Rogen and Evan Goldberg. “They said, ‘Keep it in!’ because that was just an improv thing I tried in rehearsal, and so I appreciated that,” Howard told Gold Derby at a recent FYC event for the hit Apple TV+ series, in which he joined several members of the show’s starry assembly of guest players in Emmy contention.
“I had told them ahead of time, really pay attention to me: ‘I don’t want to get too broad. I want to keep this real. I see the tone,’” said Howard, who starred in The Andy Griffith Show, American Graffiti, and Happy Days in his early career but hadn’t taken on a substantial acting role outside of cameos and his gig narrating Arrested Development in ages, focusing his career on directing and producing acclaimed films like Apollo 13, Backdraft, and his Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind.
And Rogen and Goldberg were open with notes, but not course-correcting his performance.
“It was more just encouraging or timing ideas or throwing in a line, pitching a joke and refinement on something,” Howard said. “They also allowed for little ad libs and things that they were wide open to, so it was really a pleasure.” He also loved the joke of playing Ron Howard as a rage-monster, having long earned his reputation as one of Hollywood’s nicest guys — though as a power player he occasionally has found collaborators fretting about sharing their challenging thoughts.
“I feel like I’m so approachable that I’m always surprised when everybody doesn’t just tell me flat out everything that they think,” he laughed. “Sometimes I’ll find out no, they actually do have a note; they do have a problem and they want me to know about it, but they just don’t know how to tell me. Which on one hand, I appreciate — they’re being gracious — but on the other hand, I do seek the truth about the project. I’ll make tough decisions, which might mean not taking the note and I have final cut in those kinds of controls — but I want to know what people think!”
He admitted he took his acting commitment quite seriously, and came away feeling inspired “it made me want to think about doing a little acting again someday,” Howard said. “I came away feeling pretty good about it, because I had put the work in ahead of time and I had a little window where I really wasn’t shooting anything else — I had finished post on Eden, so that was put to bed and I could really focus on this.”
Sarah Polley, too, felt the acting bug biting again after she appeared as herself in the form of a director increasingly irritated by Matt’s presence on set while she tries to shoot a complicated one-shot sequence. Like Howard, she’d long ago transitioned from acting (The Sweet Hereafter, Go) into an acclaimed directing career with films (Take This Waltz and Women Talking, for which she earned an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay).
“I loved this so much! I had no idea how much I missed acting or how much I loved it,” she told Gold Derby. “I got to do something that was very different from what I’d done in the past, and it was comedy. Nothing could have prepared me for how much joy came out of this for me. It was really the best five days I’ve ever had.”
“I think because I’d been away from it for so long, I really wanted to do well and I really wanted to do something that was a departure,” Polley added. “It just felt like such an amazing thing to be asked to do this, and Seth’s vote of confidence that I could be funny meant a lot to me. I don’t think most people would see me that way, based on the work I’d done. So it just feels like it’s been such a gift from beginning to end.”
Polley did admit while she weathered her share of on-set frustrations, she’d never quite faced anything as technically maddening as her counterpart in The Studio. “I don’t think I’ve been in quite that situation. Any of the really long sequences I’ve had, had hidden cuts in them, and I think it’s probably because I’m a very practical person who grew up listening to crews complaining about their time being wasted, so I probably wouldn’t put myself in this position!”
The Studio’s incarnation of Dave Franco was abrasively high-energy, as relentlessly upbeat as he is thoroughly drugged-out — and Franco resisted any notion that his friends Rogen and Goldberg write him any other way.
“I don’t want that! That’s not fun!” he laughed. “They know exactly how to write for me. They understand how I can excel, and so it just makes it easy. … They gave me such a great dynamic in this show where in these final two episodes, everyone else is losing their minds. They’re so stressed out, and then I get to come in and just be positive and optimistic and drive them nuts because of it.”
While extreme positivity isn’t exactly Franco’s toxic trait, his friends recognized something similar in his personality. “I’ve been lucky enough to kind of see all sides of the business as a producer and a director as well,” he said. “And so I definitely can kind of pinpoint when things are kind of going south on set and I want to insert myself and try to help in any way I can.”
Having won just about every accolade imaginable for his signature dark turn in Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston reveled in the opportunity to get back to his comedic roots: as studio owner Griffin Mill he combines the bygone swinger ethos and gravitas-bluster of a classic studio head Robert Evans with, when wacked out on mushrooms, the rubber-limbed physical comedy of one of his favorite screen icons, one who’s also a pal.
“I’m a friend of Dick Van Dyke,” Cranston told Gold Derby. “And I took so much from him as far as his physicality and his ability to be so loose in his body. I salute him and I just marveled at him over the decades that I watched him, and I would practice and I would see how you can allow your body to bend and flop in certain areas and yet not collapse. I mean, you have to be surprisingly supportive of the floppiness!”
What Cranston didn’t know at first was that his character’s name had ties to another icon, in this case the studio exec at the center of a revered anti-Hollywood film by Robert Altman. “I told Seth, ‘Why do I know this? Griffin Mill? Where’d you get Griffin Mill from?’” he revealed. “He goes ‘From The Player.’ I went, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ That’s what it was: It was Tim Robbins’ character in The Player, and I had forgotten all about it and it makes me want to go back and see The Player. I haven’t seen it in ages.”
The Studio has certainly won over the industry audience, and Cranston says its appeal is tied in to the kind of alternately hair-raising and hilarious professional war stories he and his close group of character actor colleagues regularly swap in their off-hours.
“We tell stories over dinner all the time, and we’ve all been there,” he said. “Some of the worst experiences I’ve had are in this business, and yet some of the best experiences I’ve had — and I think that’s true with any business. There are times when things collapse around you, and you have to be resilient and step forward and carry on.”
“That’s all there is, really, are war stories,” said Polley, who’s found herself commiserating with fellow filmmakers. “I had a real shift at some point where I realized, ‘Oh, this whole job is actually just solving problems.’ So you actually have to stop seeing the problems as problems and stop being so overwhelmed by difficulty. That’s the job.”
“Lately, I’ve had more of a group of filmmakers around me where we share stories, and I think hearing that on a sort of regular basis is much more helpful. It can be a very lonely job, I think is much of having community with other filmmakers is great, because you do hear those war stories and you realize they’re the norm. There’s really nothing but war stories when you’re making a film and hopefully you’re enjoying it.”
“The hardest job I had, which I won’t mention by name, actually motivated me to start directing for the first time,” said Franco of his own tours of duty. “I took a step back and realized it doesn’t need to be like that. We can still work hard and do good work, but also have fun. And so on the movies that I’ve directed, I’ve really prioritized trying to create just a really fun, safe environment where it feels like those kind of sleepaway camps and we all become a family.”
“The genius of The Studio is because they fully understand a high-wire act that is working in this business in a high-profile way,” said Howard. “And they’re able to bring comedy out of that fear, that neurosis, that anxiety and those hurt feelings and all those pressures. That’s why I think Hollywood just loves this show because it’s so truthful and it’s cathartic for us, because when we talk about it ain’t funny, but they’re presenting it in a way we can laugh at it.”
And even a Hollywood’s nice guy can forgive the occasional meltdown. “This business does heighten emotional reactions at certain times,” Howard offered. “I’ve seen some people who are just great – when I say great, I mean they’re conscientious, they’re thoughtful, they’re gracious people. And yet at a certain moment they just crack. They’re exhausted, they’re frightened, they’re deeply frustrated, whatever it might be. And it happens. And I’ve felt it. I’ve had moments where I was angry.
“But,” he laughed, “I’ve never thrown my hat at anybody, let me put it that way.”
