Viewers of an acclaimed new Apple TV+ series have been left overjoyed by an actor’s return to screen after 15 years,
Eight-part series The Studio follows Seth Rogen’s Hollywood exec as he blunders his way through a series of production mishaps alongside famous stars playing heightened versions of themselves.
The series, which has shades of both Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, features many actor cameos, including Zac Efron, Olivia Wilde and Steve Buscemi – but it’s also heavy on the directors, too: Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Friday Night Lights’ Peter Berg show up in the first outing alone.
But it’s the cameo in the standout second episode that’s receiving the most acclaim – heightened by the screen return of actor-turned-directed Sarah Polley whose last film appearance was in 2010’s Trigger.
The credits of former child star Polley, who starred in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, include Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), as well as Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake.
In 2006, the Canadian directed Julie Christie to an Oscar nomination in her directorial debut Away from Her, and followed this up with documentary Stories We Tell and Women Talking, for which she won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2023 Oscars.
Polley plays an exasperated version of herself trying to capture “a oner” – an extended one-take sequence – but is repeatedly met with obstruction by Rogen’s character. It marks the star’s first venture into comedy.
Viewers are praising her appearance, with @paulswhtn writing on X/Twitter: “I love how after Martin Scorsese stole the show in the first episode then Sarah Polley did in the second one.”
Another viewer, @alexdorped, added: “Did you know the small glimpse of happiness I had to see Sarah f***ing Polley acting again when watching this episode.”
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Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
Meanwhile, @ConnorLagore wrote: I am all in on The Studio almost entirely because of Sarah Polley in the second episode.”
Speaking about the episode, Polley told The Wrap: “I really try to keep an even keel on set, but that means repressing a lot of feelings for a lot of years, and I felt in this episode I could really let all of that out. So it felt like a very intense therapy in the best possible way.”
Polley said the experience of acting alongside Rogen and co-star Catherine O’Hara reignited her love of performing,
“It made me love acting again,” she told Vanity Fair. “I was totally shocked. I thought I was doing this fun thing with Seth, and I discovered I really loved acting. Maybe I never really knew I loved acting because I did it since I was so young, and there was so little agency when I was younger, and film sets were so different when I was in my teens and early 20s – I’d had so many weird and s***ty experiences.”
One such experience occurred on the set of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen when she was just eight. In her 2022 memoir, Run Towards the Danger, Polley recounted a traumatic on-set experience after an explosion-gone-wrong.
“Blasts of debris exploded on the ground around me, accompanied by deafening booms that made me feel as if I myself had exploded,” she wrote. “A log I was to run under was partially on fire. The gigantic blasts continued and shook everything around me. I ran, terrified, straight into the camera, tripping over the dolly tracks.
“It didn’t seem possible that this could have been the plan, that things hadn’t just gone terribly wrong. But they hadn’t. This was the plan.”
The Studio’s first two episodes are available to stream on Apple TV+ now. New instalments arrive on Tuesdays.
