The Studio’s Ike Barinholtz: Wild Hollywood satire is basically a real-life documentary

“Oh! It’s the truth!” Ike Barinholtz declared of new series The Studio.

Unhinged, stressful and wildly, wildly funny, The Studio is Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satire of Hollywood.

The show follows the goings-on at the fictional Continental Studios and its newly promoted boss, Matt Remick, a man who loves movies so much his biggest fear is he’s going to ruin the business forever. Matt got in the business to make auteur-driven, arthouse masterpieces. His first assignment in charge is to green light to Kool-Aid movie.

Across 10 episodes, the series skewers the personalities, egos, absurd anxieties, politically incorrect meetings and general circus chaos of the industry. But surely it’s all a next-level exaggeration, right?

“I’m trying to think of a moment that really, really rings false to me, and I’m coming up short,” Barinholtz told The Nightly. “Even the most stylised moments, if you take something like the Olivia Wilde episode, you’re like, ‘Well, a director could never be this much of a megalomaniac’.

“Then you’re like, ‘Oh, no, wait, I know several of them’.”

As executive Sal Saperstein, Barinholtz is one of the few actors in The Studio who’s playing a character, one of the five core cast (Rogen as Matt Remick, Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn and Chase Sui Wonders are the other four) of studio executives trying to navigate Hollywood shenanigans.

Everyone else is playing a version of themselves, from directing luminaries including Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Sarah Polley, to actors such as Anthony Mackie, Charlize Theron, Zoe Kravitz, Steve Buscemi, Greta Lee, Ramy Youssef and the rest.

Wilde, as Barinholtz mentioned, plays herself in an episode in which she is directing a film starring Zac Efron when a canister of film goes missing.

Barinholtz may be just onscreen talent in The Studio, but he is also a writer and producer, having worked behind the scenes on the likes of sitcom The Mindy Project, buddy action comedy Central Intelligence and the Kate Hudson basketball show Running Point. He has been in every type of room in Hollywood.

“I’ve been lucky enough to be in this business for a long time, so I’ve been in development hell, and then production hell, and greenlight heaven. I’ve dealt with all kinds of executives over the years and a lot of them are my close friends to this day.”

In forming Sal Saperstein, Barinholtz drew from all those people – some he liked, some he didn’t – taking little bits and pieces from those real experiences.

“I’m sure a lot of these friends of mine, when they’re watching the show, they might be like, ‘I think I said that one time in a meeting’,” Barinholtz said.

Barinholtz saw Sal as someone very similar to all the “white guys who came into this business in the eighties or nineties and the world was their oyster, and now with the changing world, a lot of people have left but they’ve been forced out or they’ve quit or they’ve died”. But there’s Sal Saperstein, eternal survivor.

Sal really should be referred to by his full name because Sal Saperstein is a character you’ll definitely remember after The Studio’s Golden Globes episode, which recreates the glitzy awards ceremony.

In the fictionalised universe of the series, Sal Saperstein and Adam Scott, of Parks and Recreation and Severance fame, were housemates were they were starting out, and Sal gets a little call-out during Scott’s acceptance speech, which starts a trend.

“If next year someone wins an actual Golden Globe and thanks Sal, if Adam Scott wins for Severance, which he probably should, if he thanks Sal Saperstein, that means that we officially will have crossed the plateau,” Barinholtz mused.

But there will be no phone calls, no back channel lobbying and definitely no desperate, personal pleas. If it’s going to happen, it has to be organic.

The way The Studio is structured is that each episode more-or-less works as a standalone chapter centred on one story beat – giving Ron Howard notes on his movie or getting in the way on Sarah Polley’s set as she’s trying to capture a one-shot take against the natural sunset.

There’s a plotline in which Rogen’s character is trying to convince oncologists that movies are just as important as saving lives. That episode prompts the question, will The Studio resonate with audiences outside of the entertainment bubble?

“I was worried about that too, but at SXSW, we had a huge premiere with so many people and I have a feeling most of the people in that audience are not entertainment-adjacent and they were laughing and that made me feel great,” Barinholtz said.

“It made me confident folks who have no connection to this business will enjoy watching stupid people scream at each other in beautiful locations.”

The Studio might be intoxicating for the inside baseball audiences who will recognise the cogs of Hollywood but like industry satires such as The Player, The Franchise, Sunset Boulevard or even Entourage, there are broader themes for anyone to latch on to.

“We’ve all had a boss who’s trying too hard to prove himself, we’ve all had a co-worker who thinks they know more than we do and we’ve all wanted to be thanked for something that we did,” Barinholtz said.

There’s also The Studio’s key conflict, which will resonate with anyone who’s ever watched anything produced out of Los Angeles – that tussle between the artist and the money men.

In The Studio, the money men also love movies and artists, they’re just not always on the same side, even if they want to be.

“These guys love movies,” Barinholtz explained. “Matt Remick loves movies and a lot of the people he’s inspired by, if you look at Hollywood executives as a bunch of completely soulless, sycophant yes-men who will green light anything to make a movie and are completely anti-art, that’s not the case.

“People go into this business, nine times of out 10, because they love movies, because a movie changed their life. Or a TV show changed their life. But the job crashes into the reality of this business. Since 1915, it’s been a balance between art and commerce.

“Some years commerce is winning. Sometimes art is winning. Sometimes you have the right balance.”

Despite all the hand-wringing about the future of the industry, about contracted budgets, intellectual property-driven commissioning priorities, streaming disruption and the spectre of AI, Barinholtz said The Studio is not ringing the death knell for Hollywood.

The show and he are both optimistic about the heart of this bonkers business.

“I’ve always said humans have been telling stories for thousands of years and they always will. Technology will sometimes raise that up and it will sometimes strike it down, but there will always be a need for people to be entertained.

“My takeaway from this show is that the future is uncertain but brighter than people think.”

The Studio is on Apple TV+ from Wednesday, March 26