Welcome to the Hahnaissance: Kathryn Hahn on Casting a Spell on Audiences With ‘The Studio' and ‘Agatha All Along'

Yahoo

21-05-2025

[This story contains spoilers from 's penultimate episode, 'CinemaCon,' and the finale of .]
Kathryn Hahn was in desperate need of a good laugh. After reprising her role as the perfidious, power-hungry witch Agatha Harkness in her own eponymous Disney+ series Agatha All Along, Hahn, who has carved out a niche in recent years for playing messy antiheroines, was looking to return to the kind of ensemble comedies which had defined the first two decades of her career.
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The Studio, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's latest Apple TV+ series about the raucous misadventures of the executives working at a legacy Hollywood movie studio, was just what the doctor ordered. Although they had initially conceived of Hahn's marketing maverick Maya Mason as more of an antagonist to the group of hapless executives at Continental Studios, Rogen and Goldberg decided to retool the role after extended discussions with Hahn, who based her frenetic, foul-mouthed character on an amalgamation of Hollywood businesswomen she's encountered over the years.
'As we kept talking about her, we found her [to be] as desperate to hold onto her job, as desperate to stay relevant, as panicked at the youth coming up behind her, as anyone in this core group of people,' Hahn tells The Hollywood Reporter. 'They're basically trying to keep [themselves] from drowning at every moment; they're scared of losing their jobs and losing everything. Films are their entire lives, and the people they work with are basically their families and their social lives. That idea sounded really fun with this group of people. I also knew it was going to be an ensemble, and that's always such a fun place to be in comedy.'
Over the course of the 10-episode first season — a second season has already been ordered — Rogen's newly appointed chief Matt Remick struggles to reconcile his love for movies with his need to prioritize his company's bottom line at all costs. In the two-part season finale, the executives arrive in Las Vegas for CinemaCon, an annual presentation to advertisers and journalists about their content slate for the next year, where all hell (naturally) breaks loose.
'I don't even know if I could say it's my Weekend at Bernie's dream come true, to be honest, because that's a dream I didn't even know I had,' Hahn says of the finale. 'It was a dream to spend two weeks in a beautiful Las Vegas casino with Bryan Cranston, and a lot of those incredible background artists were just people at the casinos who were so patient and sweet with us. [The two-part finale is like] Weekend at Bernie's — and it goes full farce. It just pulls out all the stops. As a group going through that together, it doesn't get any better than that. It's just so stupid fun, and the stakes being so life or death again is where the comedy is.'
As she prepares to shoot a second season of The Studio, Hahn insists that she does not know anything about the next chapter of Agatha's story in the MCU, but she would reprise that role in a heartbeat. 'Believe me, I'm lighting a candle at the altar all the time,' she laughs.
Below, in a wide-ranging interview, Hahn opens up about the joyous (and stressful) experience of shooting The Studio with a murderer's row of comedians. She also offers her take on the major spoilers from Agatha, a show she jokes she could talk about until she is blue in the face.
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You've played plenty of over-the-top characters throughout your career, but this uber-hip head of marketing might be your funniest one yet. How did you think about building this character beyond what was already conceived on the page? How did you find Maya's distinctive looks and mannerisms?
You always just use what's written first. It doesn't always feel right when you go outside of what's required, but because it was written so specifically, it became very clear. I had a lot of talks with our amazing costume designer [Kameron Lennox] and with Seth and Evan: 'How can you show as much money on the outside of yourself all of the time, so that every single time you walk in a room you just feel like you're armored in what everybody can see as money?'
I wouldn't even say that necessarily it's [her] taste — it's just labels — so we imagined that she has a personal shopper. She has no time! We imagined that every once in a while, maybe once or twice a season, [the personal shopper] would come to Maya's office during lunch. All the shades are drawn, and she just does a fitting for the season. Or she'll send Maya pictures, and Maya will be like, 'Yes! She knows my taste.' There's a lot of young street brands that she's obsessed with. She has her finger on the pulse, I don't know what to tell you. (Laughs.) She wants to be ahead of the curve. Sometimes, it doesn't quite work out that way, but she's constantly looking at the 'gram and TikTok to figure out what the kids are wearing.
You've crossed paths with a lot of people in the three decades you have worked in this business, and you have presumably been in rooms with executives before, either as an actor or a producer. How much of these and send-ups have resonated with your own in Hollywood?
So much! I think that was why it hit me so hard. I thought, 'Are people going to really understand this outside the business, because it's so industry-specific?' And that's the thing that made me so excited — it does translate to any workplace situation, and I guess funny is funny. I think those dynamics are so universal. But for the business part of it, I certainly haven't been in a lot of rooms with heads of studios. As a working actor for hire, I'll meet the junior execs. They'll come to set to visit in a producing capacity, and they're always so lovely. Those decisions about what seems so myopic and not even in the same reality as the stuff that we're making — I have been unaware of those things. But I've definitely seen the way things are proposed to be marketed that I thought, 'Oh, this has nothing to do with what I thought that was about!' (Laughs)
I definitely have been in situations where you get onto the set and there's a whole other video village, and there's a group of people sitting there with really nice snacks, and you just see the glow of cell phones on a dark soundstage — and you know the producers are visiting that day. (Laughs) I'm sure my directors and the producers have felt their presence, but I certainly have never been put in that position with the studios.
People have tried to satirize Hollywood before, but takes that meta quality to another level. Episode two, for instance, dramatizes the incredibly stressful process of trying to shoot a — or a single, unbroken take of a long scene — against fading daylight. You guys also shot the majority of the scenes in as 'oners,' with some limited cuts here and there. What did you make of the experience of shooting so many 'oners' in this first season? Had you done many 'oners' in the past?
There was definitely a panic period at the beginning where I didn't have the rules down yet. If you forget a line, you'd see this incredible camera operator sigh and put his camera down. That really kept me in a state of panic at the beginning. It took me a second to warm up. I just don't want to let anybody down, especially because everybody is working at this high vibration. Everyone is in the same boat, which I think really helps with attention [in the scenes], because we were just full-on really tense and trying to make sure that we got it and that nobody screwed up.
I remember [another] gig where we were running over, and the night was getting way too long, and we had to move on. I remember it was an intense reaction shot of mine, and I was looking at my co-actor behind the camera and we were locked in, and then you could see there were some producers just staring at us like, 'Wrap it up. Wrap it up.' I don't think they knew the tension they were adding into that particular scene, which actually ended up helping us. (Laughs) I've definitely been in those situations. That's why that second episode really got me. The 'oner' really stressed me out because I feel like I've been in that position. I probably haven't, but I think it is so relatable, and the whole time you feel like you're going to vomit.
For me, episode seven — which digs into how concerned Hollywood has become with race, to the point that they're almost over-correcting to avoid playing into kind of racial stereotypes — is your strongest episode of the season. I loved your line delivery of 'I love lesbians, but white women are the fucking worst right now. They're so toxic.' What were your takeaways from that episode in particular?
(Laughs) Well, all of that is so frickin' cynical, and sometimes I feel like it was ripe a little bit [to satirize]. Like, what is everybody really talking about right here? A lot of people like to talk around race, especially around casting, and nobody wants to fuck up. Nobody wants to let any single person down or be offended or be confronted. In most cases, it's very warranted, but all the panicking behind the scenes, and the little fires that are created that don't need to be fires, and the swirling drama around decisions that actually are not that big of a deal — that always makes me laugh. These people don't want to lose their jobs or be canceled, so all these teeny things are so micromanaged in a way that it also becomes worse than the thing that they were looking to avoid.
Let's talk about your . The Agatha-Rio (Aubrey Plaza) relationship has clearly struck a chord with audiences, and there have been a lot of theories about what prompted Agatha to kiss Rio a.k.a. Death and to essentially sacrifice herself to save Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke). How did you think about playing that fateful moment between your characters? Can you give voice to Agatha's internal dialogue as she made that choice?
I hadn't really thought about it until we were there on the day. We were blessed enough to be able to do it in pretty chronological order, so there was so much track already set behind that moment when we got there. Agatha had been running for centuries away from this inevitability of death and this very toxic ex-lover — the love of her life who was also the worst thing for her. Whenever they would meet, they kept bringing each other lower and lower and lower, which is clearly not a high-vibrational relationship. So I think that kiss couldn't have been planned [in the characters' minds], but I think there was an inevitability to it.
Agatha would be loath to say it was about the boy, but I think that, of course, was [part of Agatha's decision]. She didn't want that to happen again to another child that she cared about. She became very tender towards Billy, and I think that was her final way of ensuring his continued journey. I also think that Agatha didn't know if it was going to be final. I think she knew it was happening, but she's such a survivor and such a scrapper that [she thought] she would be able to squirrel her way back into his life in some way.
That kiss is really bittersweet too. For Agatha, besides her child, that's the love of her life. They're each other's most formidable barring partners. There's nobody else that could charge them up or turn them on intellectually more than each other, so that's why they can't stay away from each other. It's like this gravitational pull. So I think that's what that kiss also felt like, now that I'm talking about it — it did feel like a magnet. There was an inevitability, but I think there was almost no choice. She just was pulled to her mouth.
Aubrey admitted that she signed on to this show mostly because she wanted to work with you again (after ). We only get a little glimpse into the dynamic between your characters. Did you two ever discuss the history of the relationship? Do you have any idea of how they first met or even became a couple before they went their separate ways?
Aubrey's one of my favorite actors on the planet, and she's so extraordinary. I just trust her, so I knew that whatever we would bring to it was going to be really rich and juicy, and for some reason, we didn't really talk about that [dynamic]. We kept it simmering. We would sit kind of far away from each other on set — not anything consciously, but we just kept it at a low broil because I certainly didn't know where it would go, or how deep it would go. We would send each other pieces of music, poems and movies to watch that may or may not have had anything to do with them, but it definitely was in the stew when we finally got to do our scenes.
I think for the history of the two of them, [series creator] Jac [Schaeffer] didn't even really talk about it either. I assumed that it's just been centuries and centuries and centuries of an on-and-off toxic relationship. Every time they tried to get away, they would find each other over some body at some point, some carcass or a whole coven, and that was their meet-cute somewhere long, long ago. It was a lot of flirting over a bunch of corpses that Agatha had just decimated. (Laughs.)
Everything always comes back to Agatha's complicated relationship with Nicky. He was always her kryptonite, because she knew that she wouldn't be able to protect him forever and that he would leave her eventually.
That's motherhood! You can't protect your child forever. It's like, you love this thing with everything you have, and you know that you eventually have to let them go — whatever that means — but that's your job, as a parent. It's the worst!
So much of Agatha's backstory comes back into focus in the final episode. After inevitably losing Nicky to Death, Agatha essentially tried to fill that bottomless void by killing witches and developing an insatiable amount of power. What did that final episode unlock for you in terms of your understanding of the character, and what was it like for you to play the aftermath of her loss?
What I know about Agatha is that she was tossed out of her original coven because [they believed] she was born a bad seed, that she would always be bad, that there was no redeeming her. Her mother and coven, a.k.a. her family of origin, wanted to kill her at the stake! So in terms of childhood trauma (laughs), she definitely had a lot to work with. Since she destroyed her mother and her coven [to save herself], she had been just trying to gain more power. She knew that she got power from [killing other witches], so that was her protection and also her making herself [feel] big and worth it and viable, which was to keep gaining power. Her lack of empathy is pretty intense. And it's all women — she just wants to destroy witches.
When she had this little baby boy inside of her and then when he's born, I think that something else cracked open [inside of her], whether or not she'd want to admit it. And to know that she had just a limited amount of time, that she had to beg for that time — I think she forgot that [he would die] at some point, as she was raising him. I think with Aubrey's genius take on Death, Death didn't want to do it. It's out of her control. But again, it's this horrible car crash that you knew was going to happen at some point.
For Agatha, it's interesting that we did [her backstory] at the end. I always knew it was where we were headed, and I could not wait to get to it, even though I knew it was going to be so brutal. But having all that track for it really helped, and the kid that played Nicky is so good too. I knew the little pieces that were going to be built up, like the hair in the locket, the dandelion, the bell, her feelings about Billy — all the things that I knew were going to pay off in that last episode. I think that definitely added a lot to the trip I was on leading there, and there was certainly some sort of catharsis when I finally got to go to that episode. It never felt like a total catharsis, to be honest with you. It always felt like there's still this rock of pain on her chest, but also, she's hilarious! It's a great defense [mechanism].
The big plot twist in the finale was that the Witches' Road, the driving force of the season, wasn't actually real. Billy was the one who had created it with his own powers, and the ballad that the witches sang was really a scam. What was your reaction to that twist, and how did that inform the way you played those scenes?
My first reaction was, 'Well done.' I was very impressed with this young man who I had written off, but it made so much sense too. It was also very fun to play the 'I'm in on it' and then to play 'I'm doubting it' — to know what to press on the gas in terms of my knowledge and my surprise [about Billy's identity] was fun. I think I had inklings very early on, but it wasn't until much later that it was crystallized. And then to see his twisted mind, it was like, 'Wow, you are a sicko! (Laughs.) Game knows game, I guess. Game respects game.' There's so many little moments that Jac had highlighted for Agatha to really question and then to have to cover it up, because we wanted to give as many options as we could [for the final cut], because that story was going to be so fascinating and people could pick up on [different things].
The with Agatha offering to act as a kind of mentor to Billy as the two of them attempt to track down his twin brother. How different did it feel for you to play Agatha as a ghost compared to a living witch, and where do you think we ultimately leave your character?
Ghost Agatha felt the exact same way, except that I had fabulous white hair now. But I think she bounced back very fast. She's had a lot of [the same thing] throughout the centuries, so I think the novelty of figuring out these new powers is a real treat. I also think that after everything that they've been through, especially her and Rio, there's a shedding, almost, of something that just didn't serve her. The acceptance of [what happened to] Nicky and this kind of self-forgiveness — boy, her shame and rage cycled pretty out of control for a while. In that opening, she seems to really look at Billy and love him, and she finds a new purpose. I don't think she'll ever stop killing witches or being who she is, but I think that it really feels good to be a mom, actually, [in a way] that she never was able to be before.
There was a recent fan theory that stood out to me: Do you think Ghost Agatha would ever try to use Billy's magic to bring Nicky back if she had the chance?
Boy, I really love that! (Laughs.) That's a really good idea. But Agatha is never going to be just one thing. I feel this myself, but as soon as I feel like I've got a handle on her, she'll throw you off track and then you have to run to where she is. But I think she's a gamer. It's a long game all the time. Jac would always say her life has been a hustle. She is a huckster. She just hustles. So I think, unfortunately, you have to always doubt what she's saying, as she does with everyone else. There's not a lot of trust there.
When I first got the gig on WandaVision, [executive producer] Mary Livanos gave me a huge binder [containing] every time that Agatha Harkness had been in the comics, which was so helpful. It was also so beautiful to see how she's changed. She had been this really gorgeous crone with her hair up. It was very similar to the look in WandaVision, kind of like an Edwardian outfit. There are recent ones where she's in a bikini or whatever with one strip of silver in her hair. That's very funny. But I think [being] a babysitter and a mentor had been her main thrust through a lot of the comics, so it felt like going home at the end of the series.
So, I take it that the door is still open for you to revisit (Ghost) Agatha at some point down the road?
Yeah! Oh, believe me, I'm lighting a candle at the altar all the time. (Laughs.) I'm constantly burning a candle — a purple candle.
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The first season of The Studio is now streaming on Apple TV+, with the finale set to release May 21. All episodes of Agatha All Along are now streaming on Disney+.
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