Latest news with #cameos
CNN
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘Hacks' star and co-creator Paul W. Downs talks Season 4's ‘surreal' cameos
As the fourth season of 'Hacks' came to a wild end this week, one thing that really stood out was the show's impressive list of public personalities appearing as themselves over the season. From Jimmy Kimmel to Kristen Bell and Seth Rogen, the only other current comedy to rival the collection of cameos on HBO Max's 'Hacks' is Rogen's 'The Studio,' Apple TV's similarly industry-centric satirical show that features Hollywood heavyweights like Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard playing themselves in hilarious turns. 'Hacks' co-creator Paul W. Downs – who also figures in the regular cast as frazzled agent Jimmy LuSaque – focused in on one particular appearance from this season, that of Carol Burnett, calling it 'surreal' in a recent interview via email with CNN. 'When we conceived of 'Hacks' it was to tell the story of female comedians who had paved the way for the generations that followed them,' Downs said of his show, which follows fictional comedian Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart) and her writer/protégée Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) as Vance vies to become to the first female host of a network late-night show. 'Carol is that for all of us,' he added. 'And we shot at Television City (in Los Angeles) steps away from the sound stage where 'The Carol Burnett Show' was filmed. It was such a full circle moment for all of us.' Downs – who counts 'Broad City,' which featured some fantastic cameos (here's looking at you, Kelly Ripa), among his earlier credits – pointed to surprise appearances in shows from years past as inspiration, like Harpo Marx in 'I Love Lucy.' 'With Deborah Vance finally getting her late night show, actors and musicians would inevitably be a part of that journey, but we tried to be selective and only employ them when the story demanded it,' he said. 'Like when Deborah experiences stage fright for the first time in her long career it was an opportunity for her to get some wisdom from someone she would look up to, and there was no one better than Carol Burnett,' Downs explained. 'And featuring Rosie O'Donnell at a moment when Deborah needed some perspective on what life would be like after her show was very special for us.' Downs said securing the cameos took some effort, such as Randy Newman, who appeared as himself in Episode 4 as one of Vance's first musical guests. '(He) doesn't play as much as he once did and 'I Love LA' is one of his more demanding songs to play, but we're so glad he got on board,' he said. Rogen, who co-created and stars in 'The Studio,' also referenced the inherent challenges of getting major stars to play themselves on his show, even briefly. 'It was a combination of (calling in) favors and people that we've never met before that I'm amazed came and did this, honestly,' he said on a recent episode of the Hollywood-focused podcast 'The Town' – whose host, Matt Belloni, funnily enough, also made a cameo as himself on the show. 'One of the hardest things was just conceptually, making these people understand what we were trying to do, and to sign onto it,' Rogen said on the podcast. He and his producing partner Evan Goldberg discussed how several of the stars they courted to appear as versions themselves on 'The Studio' – Zoë Kravitz, Charlize Theron and Zac Efron, to name only a few – wanted to know 'what their joke was,' and if it was something they found funny, they agreed to do it. In a very meta-moment, the creators and stars of 'Hacks' also made cameos this season on 'The Studio.' Both shows have been renewed for new seasons. Rogen's future cameo wishlist includes Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. Season 1 of 'The Studio' is now streaming on Apple TV+. Seasons 1 through 4 of 'Hacks' stream on HBO Max, which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Studio scrapped an entire episode because they couldn't land the perfect Hollywood cameo
Apple TV+'s The Studio is a strange blend of very real Hollywood touchstones and some blatant fan-fiction stuff that seems to exist largely to make actual film executives paranoid. (THR ran a piece recently purporting to name which real-world executives Seth Rogen's Matt Remick and his fellow suits are most likely to be based on, and it's a pretty ridiculous pile of guesswork and names you've only dimly glimpsed in credits; take it as read that they're mostly all just an amalgamation of every soulless or stupid thing anyone in power at a studio has ever said to Rogen or his friends.) All of the creatives that pop up in the show, though, are real: No fake actors, writers, or directors, just actual people playing themselves. It's what gives the show some of its fascinating sense of outrageousness—where else are you going to see Martin Scorsese break down sobbing, or Ron Howard playing a mean-spirited tyrant?—but it also imposes some pretty serious restrictions on how the show gets made. Per IndieWire, Rogen and co-creator Evan Goldberg got into the topic of hyper-specific cameos on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, noting, for instance, that the selection of directors Owen Kline and Parker Finn for a recent episode—where both are in contention for a an obvious cheap knock-off of Finn's Smile movies—wasn't just a matter of finding some vaguely known names to slot into the script. 'Not only are they famous people, but the role they occupy in Hollywood is very specific for each person,' Rogen noted, saying that, with Finn, 'There's him and no one else. We needed the director of a horror franchise that is replicable in another, shittier way. And we were like, who does Smile? Parker Finn! We thought, M3GAN maybe, but it's not quite the same thing. What we liked about Smile is that he kept doing them. If Parker Finn had said no, I don't know what we would have done. But that happened a lot — there were a lot of people who, if they said no, we'd have to reimagine the whole episode to some degree.' That is some incredibly narrow casting, and it's reportedly caused a couple of problems for the series, even though most people Rogen and Goldberg have approached have been game. 'The only people we didn't get,' Goldberg noted, 'Were [due to] a couple scheduling issues, and then there were two people who just fundamentally were not interested in playing themselves.' Still, there's at least one script for the series that had to be just straight-up tossed out (or at least held in reserve for season 2), for no other reason than the perfect celebrities weren't available. 'None of them could do it when we needed them,' Rogen revealed. 'So we literally didn't shoot the episode.' More from A.V. Club
