In the aughts, when Seth Rogen and his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg were writing the script for “This Is the End,” an apocalyptic comedy about friends left behind by the rapture, a question arose: Would it be funnier to watch the actors play completely fictional characters or heightened versions of themselves?
The pair decided on the latter, casting Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill and others as postapocalyptic versions of themselves.
In an interview, Goldberg said that the rise of reality television had made audiences increasingly curious about the lives of stars. So he and Rogen decided to lean into that curiosity and found that playing a worse version of the celebrity “was usually more fun.”
Ken Marino and David Wain, the writers of the comedy “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” (in theaters), agreed. In their raucous adventure, Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her boyfriend, Tom (Michael Cassidy), offhandedly establish a “celebrity sex pass,” which hypothetically allows each to sleep with one celebrity of their choosing should the opportunity arise. When Tom cashes in his pass during a chance encounter with Jennifer Aniston (playing herself), Gail books a flight to Los Angeles with a singular goal: to have sex with Jon Hamm (also playing himself). Upon arriving, Gail searches Hollywood for Hamm, bumping into Henry Winkler, Weird Al Yankovic and Hamm’s fellow “Mad Men” star John Slattery along the way. “Gail Daughtry,” like “This Is the End,” capitalizes on the audience’s preconceived ideas of its celebrity cast, exploiting expectations for laughs.
The films are part of a growing trend. Earlier this year, the pop star Charli XCX portrayed a heightened version of herself in the mockumentary “The Moment” (on HBO Max), and Lady Gaga tussled with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (On Disney+ and Hulu July 29). Shows like “Hacks,” “The Studio” and “The Comeback” mingle their fictional characters with Hollywood glitterati. Nicolas Cage appears as a struggling and largely unemployed version of himself in the 2022 film “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” In 2025, James Marsden earned an Emmy nomination for playing a self-obsessed avatar of himself in the show “Jury Duty.”
But the celebrity-as-celebrity casting is a delicate alchemy with volatile ingredients more likely to explode than create movie magic. To start, there’s the “chicken or the egg” dilemma of whether to write the script without the celebrity attached, knowing if they say no, you’ll have no project, or to pitch the celebrity first, sans script.
“It’s a funny thing to be like: ‘Hey, we wrote a script. Hope you like it,’” Wain, who also directed “Gail Daughtry,” said about approaching Hamm.
Over Zoom, Hamm said that he found the script “silly and goofy in the best way,” saving the project, which once had the working title “I’ll Take the Hamm,” from a quick death.
“Poking fun at myself is something I love doing,” Hamm said. “There’s tremendous value to that, especially if an audience is used to seeing me in a certain way.” After Hamm agreed to the role, he texted Slattery and encouraged him to sign on.
Not every project is so lucky. On their Apple TV series, “The Studio,” Goldberg and Rogen scrapped and rewrote numerous episodes because stars said no.
“We had an episode we were psyched on,” Goldberg said. “Then the actor dropped out, and the idea no longer worked.”
One Season 2 episode was rewritten nine times for nine different actors before one finally signed on, Goldberg said. And a Season 1 episode was held for Season 2 because the star it was written for had a scheduling conflict.
Lucia Aniello, who created “Hacks” with Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, got down on her knees at the Emmys to ask Carol Burnett to appear on an episode as herself. And Downs said that he remembered when Cher’s manager forwarded an email from the entertainment icon about a possible role that simply read, “I don’t want to do it.”
But in some cases, there is only one casting option. When Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten wrote “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” the only possible lead was Cage.
“I’d never met him before, and he didn’t look particularly great in the script,” said Gormican, who also directed the film, “so it was a long process.” It wasn’t until the megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer sent the script to Cage that the actor met Gormican.
Once a celebrity has agreed to play themselves, then comes the fine-tuning of the script to make the fictionalized version as accurate as needed, while pushing the character as far as the celebrity’s ego will allow.
Slattery was thrilled at how easy it was to play a washed-up version of himself. “There’s nothing I can do that’s a mistake,” he said over Zoom. “And it was liberating, because the worse I looked, the better.”
While Cage was happy to poke fun at himself, he had more notes, according to Gormican. He specified that he didn’t want to play an absentee father, having sacrificed throughout his career to spend time with his children. And for an episode of “Hacks” themed after “The Amazing Race,” that show’s host, Phil Keoghan, rewrote his opening lines to make them more authentic.
“We’ve always, going back to Season 1, incorporated the dramatic pause with the raised eyebrow and the line, ‘The world is waiting for you,’” he said, “so I just tweaked it.”
Lining up talent and zhuzhing their roles is only half the battle, though. Integrating fictional versions of real-life celebrities into worlds where real-life celebrities are also playing fictional characters requires Advanced Placement-level writing.
In “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” for example, Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs, but Lady Gaga plays Lady Gaga. So does Anne Hathaway also exist in the world of “The Devil Wears Prada”? Has Andy Sachs seen “The Princess Diaries”?
“The actual actors don’t exist in that world,” said the film’s director, David Frankel. “That’s why there are no cameos of actors. We pointedly eliminated actors because then you’re confused.” Instead, Donatella Versace, Marc Jacobs and the musician Jon Batiste are among the film’s many cameos, while, say, Sarah Jessica Parker is not.
For “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Gormican refused to cast actors Cage had previously worked with. And on “The Studio,” writers avoided mentioning projects Seth Rogen had starred in.
Despite all the unique production difficulties that come with actors playing themselves, Hamm views playing Jon Hamm the same way he does playing Don Draper. They are both characters to him.
“I’m certainly not playing me,” he said of his “Gail Daughtry” character. “There’s no version of me in this movie. It’s all amplified, crazy, heightened stuff. John Slattery’s version of himself, living in some garage and punching a dummy, is nowhere near what John’s day-to-day is.”
Despite wearing some of his own clothes in the film to help stretch the wardrobe department’s budget, Hamm said that his acting is still just making choices, finding the script’s comedy beats and bouncing off his fellow actors. The only difference between these roles and others, is that no one else could play Jon Hamm or John Slattery.
Well, apart from possibly Bradley Whitford. “They did think for a minute it would be funny if Brad Whitford played me,” Slattery said. But he noted, with a laugh, what might have been the biggest challenge for Whitford: “He’d have to pay attention to something I did at one point.”
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