Summary

Peter Huyck and Frida Perez co-created Apple TV+’s The Studio alongside Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Alex Gregory.

Huyck and Perez share their favorite line deliveries and how they brought their real-life experiences into the show.

The two break down their surprising writing process, from text chains to acting out scenes on the actual set.

The Studio is one of the sharpest, most timely comedies on TV right now. Tackling everything from making movies based on nostalgic IP to how AI is impacting the film industry, it’s managed to tap into the zeitgeist to a degree few other projects have. Centering around a fictional studio called Continental helmed by a bumbling but well-intentioned man named Matt (Seth Rogen), the series sees him attempt to balance the business and artistic side of the movie industry alongside his ousted mentor (Catherine O’Hara), his best friend and co-worker (Ike Barinholtz), his young assistant-turned-executive (Chase Sui Wonders), and the head of marketing, who he also sometimes makes out with (Kathryn Hahn).
In addition to the excellent ensemble in front of the camera, The Studio has a strong group of collaborators behind it. This includes Peter Huyck and Frida Perez, who created the show alongside Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Alex Gregory. Huyck is no stranger to the comedy space, having written on iconic shows like Veep and Frasier. Though this is Perez’s first television credit, she’s also no stranger to the landscape. She has several short films under her belt — including “White Noise,” for which she was selected to be a Sundance Ignite Fellow, and “Detox,” which was selected by the Netflix-sponsored National Association of Latino Independent Producers’ Women in Film Incubator Program — and served as Rogen’s assistant.
The Studio has already been renewed for a Season 2, which means more hilarious shenanigans are imminent. Collider got the chance to speak with Huyck and Perez about their favorite line deliveries, the challenges of writing a oner, all that nacho cheese, and more.
‘The Studio’ Creators Share Their Favorite Line Deliveries

COLLIDER: I feel like one of the most rewarding parts about being a writer is seeing the actors bring what you wrote to life and perhaps even interpret or deliver a line in a way that you never thought of. You obviously have an incredible cast, so I’m curious if there was a particular moment you can remember that you really saw that happening.
PETER HUYCK: For me, one of those moments was in the second episode when Matt, Seth’s character, walks into a take, which was based on a real thing that happened. A friend of mine — I will name him: Wolfgang Hammer — was actually running CBS Films, and he greenlit Seven Psychopaths, and he was like, “I’m gonna visit set. I’m cool. I’m a cool young studio head. I’m gonna go see how it’s going.” And he parks, and he’s kind of looking for wherever set is. He doesn’t know where to go, and he’s not part of production, but he’s trying to pretend he knows what he’s doing. And he sees Woody Harrelson standing out in this field, and he’s like, “Oh, it’s Woody. I love Woody. I’m gonna say hi to Woody. Woody!” And Woody ignores him, so he gets close, like, “Woody, Woody, Woody! What’s going on?” And Woody’s not looking at him, and finally, he’s like, “Woody, what’s wrong?” And he hears, “Cut!” and the entire production crew yells, and he’s like, “What? Oh my god, I’m such an idiot.” That was kind of where that moment came from.
But the reaction that I loved was Sarah Polley as the director in that episode runs around, and she just screams, “Fuck!” She was amazing and hilarious, but she was with Catherine O’Hara at the monitors, and the two of them were kind of collaborating. We ran it a few times where she’s on camera, and then she runs out of video village, and she’s screaming. And Catherine said, “I think it’s gonna be funnier if you start off camera, and we just hear you screaming, and then you appear in frame.” It’s that kind of collaboration where, as writers, we all do our best job to write a script, and then the actors and Seth and Evan, as the directors, come in, and everything gets more fun. Even other actors will pitch a way to deliver a line or to plus the comedy, so it really is a true collaboration.
FRIDA PEREZ: I was so amazed by the way Ike delivers every single line. Like, “Hello” — he can make that the funniest thing ever. Sal’s character is funny, too, because people are like, “Oh, he’s such a bro.” And writing lines for him is really funny because you can kind of be the worst version of yourself, but then, somehow, you write this terrible thing, and then Ike comes in and makes it really endearing and nice and somehow. I felt like I was watching him do some crazy magic trick with every line.
HUYCK: Probably because Ike is the single nicest person. Even when he’s delivering these incredibly offensive lines, you can’t help but kind of love him.
PEREZ: Love him!
HUYCK: Also one of the episodes Frida wrote was called “The War,” and you really humanized him, and I think that was important for all of us working on the show was that you understand that he might be kind of a douchebag, but he also has these daughters who kind of hate him and a messy divorce, and there’s sadness and desperation in his life. The more you know who he is not at work, the more you kind of understand his personality.
And then I would say also, for me, all of the actors deliver lines that surprise and shock, but Kathryn Hahn will say words that stay in my brain. There was a line written that was, “Cool?! Who are you, the Fonz?” And the way she says, “Cool?!” Now, any time anyone says the word “cool,” I can only hear Kathryn Hahn saying it like that. It’s like she speaks in GIFs at times.
PEREZ: For sure.
“Worst case skenario” is one that I’m constantly using.
HUYCK: I feel like that one just came out of her. Maybe it was something she’d thought of ahead of time, but she’s so in these moments, and she’s so in that character that the comedy just comes out of her. I feel like she is channeling something. She’s deeply in character.
‘The Studio’ Creators Break Down Their Unique Writing Process

Image via Lionsgate Television

Absolutely. It’s such an amazing ensemble on screen, but it’s also a real ensemble behind the camera — you’re two of five people credited with creating the show. I’m curious if you can discuss how you all work together to create such a cohesive vision and what you feel you, in particular, sort of brought to the table with the collaboration.
HUYCK: Frida, feel free to say it — “Well, I’m like 25 to 35 years younger than anyone else on the writing staff.” You bring a whole different experience.
PEREZ: I worked as Seth’s assistant and then also for Seth and Evan for like five, six years before writing on the show, and Pete and Alex have known Seth and Evan for like 20 years now, so we all know each other pretty well. I didn’t know Pete and Alex before, but when you meet people through friends, it’s like, “Oh, you’re my friend,” so that was nice. There was a familiarity. We could all be honest with each other, but we also liked hanging out and joking around.
But yes, I was the youngest, but it was awesome! It was cool. It was really fun for me to express what I think is funny and my sense of humor with people who have been working in comedy for 20 years. That was an interesting dynamic, and I think you could see that with how Quinn is in the show. I really liked writing for Quinn because I liked using her as a voice for a different generation that really wants to be part of the studio system.
HUYCK: Also, she’s a pure comedy nerd and a pure cinema nerd. She’s someone who knows everything about cinema — [Frida], you really know your cinema. She’s a great avatar for you.
I would say, from a process standpoint, this show is different from any other staff I’ve worked on. The last show I was a writer on was Veep, and for Veep, we had 12 writers at least. It was a very big staff, and we did a very traditional room where you’d go into this giant conference room with 12 seats around the table, and you’d be in there for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. This was just five of us, and we would get together and do those types of sessions, but then we had this text chain.
PEREZ: Oh, yeah.
HUYCK: You were never off duty because someone would have an idea, and it would start this riff and this roll, and you might wake up at 8 in the morning and look at your phone and think, “Oh, 92 missed messages. It’s Seth and Evan and Alex and Frida, and it is going off, and someone’s got a great idea for an episode.” And you just want to jump in and say, “How about this? What about this? You could use this actor. This actress would be amazing.” For a full two years of developing and writing the series, we never really stopped riffing.
PEREZ: As an older Zoomer, it was very Zoomer of us to write the whole show via text. [Laughs] It wasn’t a traditional writer’s room at all. It was always going, always talking. It was a text thread — it was a great group chat.
HUYCK: That’s the nature of working with Seth and Evan. They might be on a set working on a giant feature, so their schedules are not…they’re not just two other writers that are ready to sit in a writers’ room. These are two titans of industry that you get to have in a writers’ room, but they also have multiple other series and films and things going. I think that is why having this ever-breathing text chain allowed every moment to be a creative moment for all of us.
All the episodes have their own unique style and plot, which I think is really fun. I’m curious if there was an episode that you found most difficult to crack writing-wise.
HUYCK: I would say the oner was particularly challenging just in that, from a writing standpoint, you go into it thinking, “There’s no cuts. I can’t leave this character and cut to this other room — cut to this scene.” So you just have to close your eyes and say, “Okay, if I want to get from these two people having a conversation to another conversation, you have to find the PA traveling and saying something so the camera goes with them to another moment.” Writing that script, I envisioned the house, and it was pretty close to the house, Silvertop, we ended up getting.
But also, in the process of doing it, we got floor plans. We got the actual architectural plans, and we would get the space and walk through scenes. Frida would read a part, and I would read a part — Seth and Evan and Alex, everyone would read parts — and say, “Okay, we need three more lines of dialogue because this living room is twice as long as what I pictured in my head when I was writing that scene.” We would have to recalibrate everything. We actually got into the location, but we didn’t have a lot of days there. We did one prep day where we were there ahead of time, and that’s really where all of us kind of dug in and said, “Okay, this scene can’t go into this scene because they’re at the pool, and I’ve written it that they’re in the kitchen, so there has to be some connecting piece that gets you there.” Conceptually, I would say writing the oner was, for me, the most challenging of the episodes I was personally writing.
PEREZ: We spent a lot of time on the pilot. We all wrote it, so that was a big, fun collaboration. We were really hard on ourselves, obviously. Because it’s the first episode, it has to do a lot, so we rewrote that, like, hundreds of times. We built it up, tore it down, built it up, tore it down over and over. We wanted to get people to understand Matt and understand the world and understand the promotion. And then, he gets the job, and you have to start another episode — you have to start the big plot that he’s working on. That one was tough.
HUYCK: That was a thing we really debated for months — more than a year — was, “Does he already have the job? Is he a week into the job? Is he a year into the job? Do you know him? Is he just The Guy? Is it the whole pilot that he’s trying to get it, and at the end of the pilot, he gets it?” We wrote versions of both of those things, and then, eventually, there was a Seth and Evan instinct that the most interesting thing is you see him want it, but he’s diminished. You know what he’s trying to get, so you start him in a place where he’s not there yet, but he’s dreaming of this thing, and he gets it, and he realizes it’s gonna be harder than he thinks. That is almost the theme for the whole show — it’s a job he’s always wanted, and now, he thinks he’s not up to it, or he’s maybe not capable. That ended up being the perfect version.
But like Frida said, the pilot for any show will take more time than any other episode you’re writing because you’re introducing all the characters, and it’s your only opportunity. You don’t get a second chance for a first introduction, so the stakes are much higher for a pilot.
‘The Studio’ Creators on Zoë Kravitz’s Extended Cameo, Matt and Maya’s Bizarre Relationship, and All That Nacho Cheese

Image via Lionsgate Television

You guys have so many cameos in this that are so fun. I was really interested in Zoë Kravitz because she gets sort of an extended cameo. Why did she feel like the right person to play that particular role? Because it’s very specific and it does span a couple of episodes.
PEREZ: I feel like she came pretty early. She was in the Golden Globes first, for sure, and we just loved her and Blink Twice, so we were like, “Oh, this could be cool. This makes sense that this would be her next movie, and she’s winning an award. Let’s do it.” As we were hanging out on the Golden Globes, I think we were like, “Wait, I think it could be cool to bring her back. We already established her, and she’s so funny. Matt and she have a weird dynamic, and if you bring her back, you can just build upon it but also have the fun of an extended cameo. You deepen that cameo a little bit but then also still keep the fun of the cameo.”
HUYCK: Really, almost every cameo was people who were friends of Seth and Evan’s. That’s how we got them. Generally, it’d be like, “You know who would be perfect for this? This person.” And Seth and Evan would be like, “I’ll call them in half an hour and see if they want to do the episode.” You’re like, “Oh my gosh, it never happens like this.” But they knew Zoë going into it when we shot that Golden Globes episode. She just crushed, and she was so funny, so I think that was the idea — you need a few celebrities coming to present films at CinemaCon, and we’re like, “I think she would be as funny as anyone having a problem with CinemaCon.” She gets to play a much bigger comedic part than she did in the Golden Globes episode.
Frida, you mentioned Matt and her having a very interesting relationship, which reminded me of the Matt and Maya history of it all. They have such a weird dynamic that’s so funny to watch. They’re making out and have broken the rules by doing that. What is the straw that broke the camel’s back for them to be like, “We actually can’t do this anymore”?
PEREZ: I feel like it’s one of those things when two people work together, and all they do is work, and then they’re hooking up, but they don’t really like each other. [Laughs] That type of vibe. I think it’s one of those things. I don’t know if there was a moment. I don’t think either of them loves each other like that. That’s my speculation.
HUYCK: I do think, as characters, they are two people who really live at their jobs. They don’t have outside lives. They don’t have a lot of time to date, and when they do, it probably doesn’t go that well. You have a sense that, if they’re going to find someone, most likely it will be someone they’re working with. That is probably why they have this charged history. But also, you can tell they might not be ideally suited to be actually dating, but they’re just so passionate about so many things in common that you could see them having that connection.
My last question is kind of a silly one, but I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s the fact that Quinn follows the trail of nacho cheese in those last couple of episodes. I have to know how that came about, and did you make Chase actually eat this cheese?
PEREZ: I think that was Chase! I think she was feeling it. I think that was her — that was all her — and it was hilarious. I think she licked the cheese once, and it was like, “Okay, wait — you have to do that again, please.”
HUYCK: “That’s so crazy.” It is funny to see because you have people like Seth and Evan and Catherine and Kathryn and Brian who are such known comedic performers, and then Chase is so new, and she hung with them. There was no part of her that wasn’t right at their level from minute one, from the first take, so it was really fun to see her kind of show up in that way. We didn’t know when we cast her. She had not done a big comedic part before. You’re casting Catherine O’Hara, you know she’s gonna crush. Chase, we’re like, “I think she’s gonna crush,” and then, literally day one, we were like, “Oh my god, she’s great. Okay, it worked out.” That was the only roll of the dice in that big way.
The Studio is streaming on Apple TV+.

The Studio

Release Date

March 25, 2025

Network

Apple TV+

Writers

Peter Huck

Watch on Apple TV+