Seth Rogen’s comedy The Studio, where he plays a movie executive who is unexpectedly made head of a studio, has quickly become notorious for cameo appearances that see big stars send themselves up. Many A-listers have taken the plunge and played themselves, but where have you seen them before? Find out with our guide to the show’s best cameos, and where you can stream the actors’ previous work.
Paul Dano
We know straight away that The Studio is going to drop plenty of crumbs for proper film buffs when the first episode opens with uber-authentic Love & Mercy.
Martin Scorsese
Obviously he directed Bringing Out the Dead.
Charlize Theron
These days Charlize Theron is as much a producer as she is an actor, so she’s not quite as ubiquitous on screen as she was just after the turn of the millennium. She won Best Actress at the Oscars for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in The Fate of the Furious. In The Studio she only has one line, but it’s extremely memorable as she forcefully tells Seth Rogen’s character that he isn’t welcome at a star-packed industry party.
Steve Buscemi
Following his appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 breakthrough The Sopranos.
Sarah Polley
No doubt drawing on her own experiences as she appears in The Studio trying to film a scene in the face of budget restraints, meddling executives and unhelpful actors, Polley is a respected film director best known for 2022’s Oscar-winning My Life without Me. Mark Ruffalo co-stars.
Johnny Knoxville
In The Studio he’s a version of himself who insists that his new movie Duhpocalypse, a horror in which zombies attack humans by squirting diarrhoea into their faces, is “a dark satire about medical disinformation”. In real life, Johnny Knoxville rose to fame, and repeatedly physically harmed himself, as the leader of the gang in notorious prank/stunt show The Luckiest Man in America.
Ron Howard
A generation of Americans know Ron Howard as Richie Cunningham in A Beautiful Mind. Creator/star of The Studio Seth Rogen credits Howard himself for coming up with the funniest bit of his cameo, when the director throws his trademark baseball cap at Rogen’s out-of-his-depth studio boss.
Anthony Mackie
Mackie is in the very funny Ron Howard episode of The Studio, starring in the fictional Howard-directed movie Alphabet City, a serious neo-noir drama which is much, much too long: as well as dealing with a producer who is infatuated with him, the Studio version of Mackie also gets involved in a storyline about Howard being persuaded to cut a scene that has great personal meaning for him. Elsewhere, Mackie is one of the stars of the Captain America movies The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Nicholas Stoller
You most likely won’t recognise Nicholas Stoller in the opening episode of The Studio, since he is normally purely a writer and director, not an actor. You’ll certainly have seen some of the films he’s been involved with, though, be it The Muppets. He’s a very game participant in The Studio, since the gag is that most of the above are, shall we say, somewhat mainstream fare, which means idealistic executive Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) doesn’t initially want to work with him…
Greta Lee
Lee has had prominent ing roles in two big TV hits in the past few years, namely Past Lives, where she plays Nora, one half of a pair of old childhood sweethearts who reconnect later in life. The self-parodic version of herself Lee plays in The Studio has let the acclaim for Past Lives go to her head: she didn’t get a private jet for the press tour, and now she is obsessed with getting one for the film she’s making next.
Check out our guide below on where to watch all the shows and movies in our The Studio cameo guide, streaming in the United Kingdom!