During one of Chase Sui Wonders‘ days off from filming The Studio, she decided to stop by the set just to hang out. The actress was renting a house at the bottom of the Hollywood Hills, and her castmates — Seth Rogen and Ike Barinholtz, along with a few A-list guest stars — were staging a night shoot at the nearby Chateau Marmont.
“It was in between setups, and I was standing outside looking up at the hotel sign with Seth, Ike and Zac Efron,” she says. “We were thinking about how special it was to be filming in this iconic place, to be making art within these storied walls. It was a real moment of, Wow, the movies.”
Except, technically, The Studio is a TV show, albeit one that’s all about the movies. Rogen, who co-created the series with longtime partner Evan Goldberg, headlines as Matt Remick, the well-meaning, newly installed head of fictional Continental Studios who struggles to find the balance between success and integrity while overseeing an ambitious crew of C-suite strivers.
Wonders plays one of them — Quinn, Remick’s increasingly ruthless former assistant who’s just been promoted to creative exec. It’s a different type of role for the 28-year-old actress — best known for parts in Gen Z-focused ensemble projects like HBO’s racy high school drama Generations and the 2022 slasher romp Bodies Bodies Bodies — but one that Wonders was dying to play.
“I remember coming of age to Pineapple Express and being like, ‘This is what’s waiting for me in my adult life,’ ” she says of her love of Rogen’s body of work. “And I’ll stand by my opinion that This Is the End is the last great American comedy.”
Early on, Wonders, who grew up in Detroit, wasn’t thinking about acting. She studied film at Harvard, where she penned humor pieces for The Harvard Lampoon. After graduating, she dabbled in screenwriting but didn’t get much traction. “My start in this business was an underdog trying to peddle my creative ideas around town, to no avail,” she says.
In 2020, at 23, she landed a small role in Sofia Coppola’s Bill Murray comedy On the Rocks, then a year later was cast in Generations. After The Studio, she’ll next be onscreen in Sony’s big-budget reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Last year, when Wonders heard from her agents that Rogen and Goldberg were setting up a new show at Apple TV+, she wasted no time in sending in a self-tape. Nobody was more surprised than she was when she received a callback. Her audition was with Rogen. “Seth was like, ‘Just riff with me,’ ” she remembers. “I was freaking out. Thank God my character was meant to be a ball of nerves in the scene, because I had a totally out-of-body experience.”
Learning she got the part was something of an out-of-body experience as well; when the fateful email arrived, she was touring a Buddhist temple while vacationing in Japan with her family (her dad, Robert, is fashion designer Anna Sui’s brother). “It was not the time or place to be receiving good news,” she says. “I was glued to my phone at the Buddhist temple, screaming.”
The Studio, which cashes in on Rogen’s Hollywood goodwill for A-list cameos from Charlize Theron, Martin Scorsese and the aforementioned Efron, to name a few, used the real-life experiences of its cast and crew to inform its seemingly absurdist plotlines (like the one about diversity issues during the casting of a Kool-Aid movie).
“I’m constantly seeing things and thinking, ‘This would be a great plot point for The Studio,’ ” Wonders says. “I’ll text Seth and Evan to say, ‘Hey, this needs to be in season two.’ “
But Wonders also can relate to the drama under the comedy of the show — the soul-sucking struggle between art and commerce. “I am constantly at odds with the false idols in this business and the ways they can trick you into chasing after something that’s just an empty void,” she says, noting that one way she keeps from falling into that void is by living a continent away, in New York. “Seeing how you can betray yourself to get what you want, or seeing my friends get taken by the smoke and mirrors that is this business, it scares me.”
So far, though, her career is everything she could have hoped for while watching Pineapple Express as a 12-year-old. “They really let me be a freak in this show, and that was so liberating, and it empowered me to embrace my inner court jester,” she says. “I just want to do more of this, because at the end of the day it’s just really fun to laugh.”
This story appeared in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
