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Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg don’t have psychic powers, but they have what’s probably the next best thing: a friendship that stretches all the way back to attending the same middle school in Vancouver in the 1990s. When working as co-directors on a set like their Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ comedy series The Studio, the result can be kind of eerie.
“People are always like, how did you guys have the same answer to that question?” says Goldberg, 42, who co-created the Hollywood satire about a fledgling studio boss (played by Rogen) with his longtime friend, and co-directs every episode with the actor. The answer, Goldberg continues, is pretty simple: “We’ve been talking about it for years and years.”
Not that it was easy to get here, with a breakout show that landed 23 overall nominations, tying an Emmys record for comedy series set last year by FX’s The Bear. The pair had to jump through what Rogen, 43, calls “a needlessly stressful process” to be officially approved by the Directors Guild to work as co-directors on their first feature, 2013’s This Is The End. Rogen complained about the process so much that eventually his friend Jon Favreau (Iron Man, the Disney+ series The Mandalorian) signed Rogen up to serve on the Western Directors Council at the DGA. In that role, Rogen now gets to help decide who can officially be co-directors. (“I hope to think I have moved it in a direction that is more logical when it comes to directing teams,” Rogen says.)
They’ve now been an approved duo for more than a decade, co-directing a handful of TV episodes and the feature The Interview in addition to producing a slew of projects through their Point Grey banner (named after the secondary school where the pair became friends). But that doesn’t mean Rogen and Goldberg have entirely escaped the directing guild’s watchful eye. “They come to the set to see if you’re breaking the rules,” Goldberg explains, specifically when it comes to rules that require co-directors to give the same direction to their casts. As Goldberg tells me, one time, he gave a note to an actor solo, with Rogen in another part of the set. That caused some distress for the DGA representative who was watching over things that day. “They went over and talked to [Seth] and he had the exact same note he was going to give the exact same actor, because he and I had spoken about it 100 times before the day,” Goldberg says.
That level of planning and pre-discussion was especially essential for The Studio, their ambitiously shot comedy that often plays out in gorgeous long takes that require unbelievably precise comic timing. On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I talked to Rogen and Goldberg about how their decades of work together led to The Studio, which parts of Rogen’s studio chief character are based on his own insecurities and why their version of the Golden Globes on the show is so much prettier than the real thing.
“The Golden Globes are overlit and not incredibly pretty, but when I’m in that room, I find something very magical about it,” says Rogen, who was Golden Globe-nominated for his performance in the 2023 limited series Pam & Tommy. “On the grand scale of our viewers, very few of them have been to the Golden Globes — actually, truthfully, maybe a lot of them have been to the Golden Globes. But we went to incredible lengths to recreate the Golden Globes as cinematically yet accurately as humanly possible.”
Hear all of that and much more on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes the conclusion of our five-part fall preview series. Joyce Eng joins Christopher Rosen and me to look at the lineup for the streamers, where Netflix has one of its strongest ever and Apple has a big mystery awaiting us with The Lost Bus.
Remember that Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers can watch the video version of this and all other episodes, and also have access to our subscriber-only bonus episodes. This week we’re hosting our first-ever call-in show, starting at 9 a.m. PT this Friday. Details will be sent out to paid subscribers in the next few days — now’s a great time to join!
