‘The Studio’ Boss Reveals Inspiration for ‘Casting’ Episode & How It’s True to Hollywood

The Studio Season 1 Episode 7, “Casting,” is a comedic grilling of Hollywood executives who fail to understand the nuances of racism in their industry, and here, co-creator Alex Gregory explains how this is a recurring problem in real-life Hollywood.

In the April 30 episode, Continental Studios was preparing to announce the casting for its Kool-Aid movie: Ice Cube was picked to voice the animated Kool-Aid man with Sandra Oh as his wife, while Josh Duhamel and Jessica Biel were set to play a live-action couple. As studio head Matt Remmick (Seth Rogen) was preparing to make the casting announcement at Comic-Con, he and his team panicked as they tried to decide if casting a Black man as the Kool-Aid man was playing into racial stereotypes — and they were concerned more about whether their casting choices could appear racist, rather than if they actually were racist. Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) then tried to defend their choice by saying she never saw Kool-Aid as a drink mostly enjoyed by Black people but more of a “poor-person drink.” Big yikes.

The spiral that followed ended up creating more problems and glossing over other issues. They asked one of their few Black colleagues, Tyler (Dewayne Perkins), for advice as well as guest stars Ziwe and Lil Rel Howery. They all said it’s not racist to cast Ice Cube in the role, but then Ziwe and Lil Rel asked if they have a Black woman playing his wife, throwing out names like Gabrielle Union and Keke Palmer, making the group notice for the first time in the whole process that they excluded Black women entirely from their talent pool. On top of that, the people of color in their cast were only playing animated characters while the white cast would be live-action.

Every new idea snowballed into new issues. They scrambled to recast the entire movie and tried to represent every demographic of the U.S. population. Eventually, Matt asked Ice Cube himself for his opinion. The conversation was as painfully uncomfortable as you would imagine.

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They kept the rapper in the role and went through with the Comic-Con announcement. Fans were excited by the casting, but then an audience member called out the report that they used AI for the animation instead of human animators. All of that time and energy spent to make sure they were representing people well, and it didn’t even occur to them that replacing human animators with AI was a problem.

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Of this, Gregory tells TV Insider that this episode “is a distillation of the panic that people in the business feel not about doing the wrong thing, but about being perceived as doing the wrong thing.”

“That’s the whole thing with ‘Casting.’ He never says, ‘I don’t want to be racist.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t want to be seen as racist,'” Gregory says. Matt and the team wanted to avoid controversy more than they wanted to make sure their decisions were actually inclusive. In the real world, this mindset leads to Black artists and other underrepresented groups struggling to get their projects greenlit.

“I’ve had people tell me that episode really spoke to them because they’ve had conversations like that behind closed doors,” Gregory shares. “But we wanted to make it clear that these aren’t people that are cavalier about it. They really want to do — or be seen doing — the right thing. But in trying to do that, they gloss over other things.”

Gregory says that the AI blindspot further highlights how behind the curve Matt’s team is. “AI could actually put people out of business,” he notes of this real-world issue, adding that AI in Hollywood is “one of those moral, ethical gray areas” that the industry is also ill-equipped to tackle.

The Studio, Wednesdays, Apple TV+