Sarah Polley is back on camera — and doing slapstick — thanks to Seth Rogen

Sarah Polley lets out a velociraptor roar in The Studio.

She's guest starring as a version of herself in Canadian duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's caustically funny satire about everything wrong with the movie business today. Rogen plays Matt, a hapless studio head navigating the tension between Hollywood's franchise obsession and his genuine love for the auteur-driven movies that aren't built around IP. In the second episode, which is now streaming on AppleTV+, Rogen's Matt enthusiastically crashes the set of the latest Sarah Polley movie. And when things spiral out of control, the director rages in a way she never has in real life.

"It was really cathartic," says Polley, about her first onscreen role in 15 years.

Oh, sorry.

Did I bury the lede?

Sarah Polley is acting again! Somehow Rogen convinced her to get back in front of the camera.

The former child star, who had lead roles in CanCon classics like The Sweet Hereafter and Hollywood genre fare like Go and Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, gave all that up to focus on writing and filmmaking. And in the years since, she built a reputation for telling heavy and often deeply personal stories: exploring the dying days of a marriage in Take This Waltz; an intimate exploration of a family secret in Stories We Tell; confronting the violence women endure, as in Alias Grace, or taking a courageous first step towards communal healing, as in Women Talking.

Now, with an Oscar in hand for adapting Women Talking, she's back on screen with some surprising bedfellows, appearing opposite Rogen and fellow Canadian icon Catherine O'Hara. She's also doing slapstick — a kind of comedy we don't typically associate with the name "Sarah Polley." And she's loving it.

"It was almost embarrassing how much fun I had," says Polley, laughing, "and how vocal I was about how much fun I was having. I remember on the last day saying, 'I don't want to go home to sad movies.' And Seth was like, 'You know, you don't have to. No one's forcing you to. You don't have a contract to make people really upset all the time for the rest of your life.'"

 For all the "gravity" Polley pours into her work and politics she's really a wisecracker at heart. That's why Rogen had been insisting over the years — ever since he starred opposite Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz — that Polley try her hand at comedy. And finally, during a breakfast in LA just over a year ago, when Polley was in the middle of awards campaigning for Women Talking, Rogen presented her with the opportunity.

"I think that he's probably the only person I would have taken the risk with," says Polley, on a Zoom call from home, "because I felt like he had such confidence in me. And, as an actor, that means everything: feeling like the director has confidence in you. It really made me feel liberated to play, which is really the mode you have to get into, and the mode that Catherine O'Hara and Seth are constantly in. Just this constant sense of play, discovering, experimenting and finding things."

There's a lovely circularity to this reunion. Take This Waltz is the first movie Polley made after giving up acting. That movie, where Williams stars as a woman ready to step out on her perfectly stable but hopeless marriage, is bathed in warm colours and golden light. Polley recalls how much time Rogen spent on that set when he wasn't working, just hanging by the monitor, taking pictures and staying "deeply invested in the process."

And now Rogen is directing Polley's return to acting, in an episode where she plays a director, and he's playing the eager and enthusiastic studio head hanging by the monitor, extremely invested in what her character is doing. And she just happens to be directing an elaborate continuous shot (a "oner") of a woman stepping out on her life, during magic hour, trying to capture the same golden glow that Take This Waltz basks in.

So yeah, consider it an unintentional sequel of sorts, but one where Polley isn't just exploring a completely different style of acting — more improvisational and open to discovery (like Rogen and O'Hara) than the preparedness that she typically brought to her roles and stuck to —but also exorcizing some demons as a director who finally flies off the handle.

"I let out all the frustration I'd internalized over the years on set," says Polley. "It was really, really satisfying."

That wasn't the original plan. Rogen and Goldberg wrote Polley to be as nice as she typically is. This is the director who instead of calling "Action!" says "Action please," which she couldn't even resist doing when playing the fictional take on herself in The Studio. 

"I'm telling you, it's a bit much," she says with a self-deprecating chuckle. "I mean kind is great. But whatever I do is kind of compulsive and a little bit neurotic and clearly based in childhood trauma.

"Because I grew up with so many filmmakers who were such hurricanes and created such chaos, I've put a lot of my energy as a filmmaker into how you make the nicest environment."

It was Polley that wanted to give her character some boundaries, and test what it would be like to finally lose it when niceness only invites Rogen's Matt to feel entitled on set.

"I felt like it was an opportunity to show how niceness on a set isn't always kindness," says Polley. "There are moments in which, as happens with my character in The Studio where, you open that door to someone who is potentially going to be a toxic element. You being really nice to that one person can be a calamity. And there is a moment in The Studio where I want [Rogen's character] to feel included and not have his feelings hurt, and it begins a process that doesn't end until everything's destroyed."

Polley thinks back to the closest she's ever come to flipping out on set, after being "pushed and pushed" by an individual, and describes being terrified of it.

"I remember saying to my husband, 'I am so scared I'm going to snap at somebody.' And he said, 'you've gotten so far. You would hate it so much. It doesn't cost you anything to walk away for five minutes, and you'll feel better.'

"So I did once walk away for five minutes. I literally said, 'Excuse me, I just need a minute.' And I walked away for five minutes. I came back and everyone looked traumatized! It's as though I had trashed the set."

Polley isn't the only famous director playing themselves in The Studio. Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and even indie darling Owen Kline are in the mix too. They're all filmmakers that Rogen's character courts, because he's eager to be in the vicinity of cinematic greatness, but also alienates, because he's in the business of milking IP. In the first episode, he's trying to sell Scorsese on directing a Kool-Aid movie.

What makes The Studio work as spectacularly as it does — besides the fact that Canadians, as outsiders, are just so good at skewering American culture — is its empathy and affection for the people who get all the blame for the garbage we're fed in theatres. There's a tragedy to Rogen's character — a guy who loves movies but realizes his job is killing them — which is played for belly laughs but also, in smaller moments, a sense of melancholy.

"The show is ultimately about the business of films destroying the art of films," says Polley, "and that is a daily truth for filmmakers. The constant issue with film, as opposed to many other art forms, is it costs so much. Money has more say in film."

She's feeling grateful that she's largely existed outside the studio system and hasn't had to succumb to the game that so many respected directors have to play with guys like Matt. She refers to pitching projects by saying "it's this movie meets that movie," a very real gimmick reducing their projects to algorithms while basically suffocating any sense of originality. "I guarantee you the people who made those movies that we remember 40 or 50 years later did not say 'it's like this other movie.'"

Polley also addresses the whole "one for them, one for me" mentality that so many talented directors make compromises with, when being seduced by the franchise-focused industry that The Studio takes to task.

"You can say, 'I'm just going to make this commercial movie for a few years, and maybe one more commercial movie, and then I'll go back to my independent films that I care about that have something to say.' But the truth is, who you are surrounding yourself with will have a huge impact on what you want, what you believe, what you think is important, where you put your energy, no matter how resilient you think your little soul is.

"You see a lot of amazing filmmakers and suddenly it's just one bad film after another. They're not hanging out with the people they hung out with when they made their great movies anymore. They're taking advice from people whose main focus is business, industry and profit. It's really, really hard to separate yourself from that. And I say that, from personal experience. 

"I feel very lucky that I live in Toronto and most of my friends are not in the film industry. But when I have periods where I'm spending a ton of time around people who are in the industry, and focused on those things, I get confused for a minute."

The first two episodes of The Studio are now streaming on AppleTV+ with new episodes arriving weekly.