Sarah Polley Quit Acting 17 Years Ago. Then Seth Rogen Asked Her to Play Herself

It has been 17 years since Sarah Polley last filmed a project as an actor, and it took an unusual idea from her former collaborator Seth Rogen to lure her back.

Over the past two decades, the Toronto native has become one of her generation’s most decorated filmmakers. She won an Oscar two years ago for writing Women Talking, which was also nominated for best picture. She also helmed the award-winning documentary Stories We Tell, the Michelle Williams vehicle Take This Waltz (costarring Rogen), and the Alice Munro adaptation Away From Her. But before all that, Polley was a prolific child and young adult actor who made her name in both prestige projects (1997’s The Sweet Hereafter) and genre hits (2004’s Dawn of the Dead). “Move over, Parker Posey,” Entertainment Weekly wrote in 1999. “Sarah Polley…is the new Indie Queen.”

A few years ago she wrote about how she was placed in dangerous, ultimately traumatic situations while filming Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen at eight years old. As her directing career took off, she happily left performing behind. “I had always felt like if I returned to acting—which is a big if for me—it would just have to be something completely different than anything I’d ever done, because I felt like I had been giving the same performance over and over again for years,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I was hitting some kind of wall creatively.”

Rogen’s offer for Polley certainly felt different enough. The second episode of his new Apple comedy, The Studio, takes place on the set of a fictional movie being directed by Polley. Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, runs the studio backing the film, and he stops by on the day that Polley and her star Greta Lee (also playing herself) need to complete a complex tracking shot. Matt’s presence creates constant disruptions—and some hilariously uncomfortable tension between him and Polley.

Knowledgeable viewers understand that this isn’t just any director cameoing as themselves—it’s a gifted former actor making an auspicious return. Let’s hope that Polley’s next gap between on-camera jobs won’t be quite as long.

Vanity Fair: So how did this happen?

Sarah Polley: I was in LA for awards season, and I can’t remember if I got in touch, but I wanted to ask Seth some advice about a thing that I was writing about awards season. I was picking his brain. Then later over coffee, Seth described this show, and he described the episode to me that they were thinking of writing and asked me if I would be interested in doing it if they wrote it. I said, “I am absolutely in—100%,” which I don’t think I’ve ever said to an acting job.

I was going to say—it’s obviously been a long time.

I had this thought that, if I ever do it again, it has to be after a long break, and I have to forget everything I know and do something totally different. That’s a strange thing to say about playing yourself, but it actually was. I’ve never really played anything like myself! It was an opportunity to, first of all, work with Seth and Catherine [O’Hara, who plays the movie’s producer], and also to be in a comedy, which I’d always kind of secretly wanted to do—but I’d never said that out loud.

Then I got terrified. They sent me the script. I was like, What on earth have I done? I’m not going to be able to remember lines anymore! What the hell? But I’m so glad. Every day was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had on a set. It really was. It was embarrassing how much I enjoyed myself.

How did you react to the version of you that Seth and Evan Goldberg had written? Did you have any feedback?

In the first version I read, I was really nice and I stayed pretty nice. I saw this opportunity to let out a lot of the frustrations I’ve ever had as a director—to finally let them out onscreen. I have a really hard time expressing anger and frustration and am quite conflict-averse. Suddenly, I thought, Oh, there’s this delicious opportunity to snap. The script was pretty close to what it ended up being, but the character of me got a little pricklier after we talked about it. Seth said later, “We were just being careful. We didn’t think you would want to not seem nice.” [Laughs]

That writing team is just so agile. Everything can kind of turn on a dime, and they respond to different people so well. That was really interesting for me. As a filmmaker, I think I’m quite controlled and quite planned, and they certainly were very well prepared, but they also think so well on their feet. There’s such flexibility and there’s such resilience in their filmmaking—just watching the way people could pivot was new for me. I realized something that’s essential for comedy is that ability to make things better in the moment.

Did you recognize any of yourself in what they’d written? You’ve directed Seth, of course, so he knows how you work.

Yeah. A bit overly people-pleasing. I can be very distracted by wanting people to feel okay. There’s actually a moment in the episode that I learned a lot from. It’s the moment after I feel kind of sorry for Seth’s character. He’s messing everything up and he feels dejected. I try to make him feel better by inviting him into the process, and that actually is the minute where things really devolve. He’s been invited in, and he should not have been. There should have been a firm boundary.

I recognized myself in that moment of softening that boundary with someone who is undeserving—it’s not a good thing. I watched a cut of it with my kids, and my kids were like, “You’re not like yourself at all, though.” First of all, they did not care for my acting. They were very disappointed. They were like, “We knew you were an actor. We thought you were good.” [Laughs] But they basically were like, “You’re doing all this stuff.” At the beginning, I was like, “No, but that’s what Mommy does at work. Mommy does a lot of trying to make things nice at the beginning of the day. It’s not fun to watch, maybe, but that’s what happens.”

You mentioned the terror at learning lines and prepping to play the part. Was your process different at all so many years later?

In the past, I did such laborious character work. I felt like my job in this was to be incredibly in the moment and open. Working with Catherine O’Hara and Seth, I needed to be really porous and able to pivot and learn from them in the moment. It was so liberating. The idea of deciding to have maximum fun and surprises in a day was very new to me.

Did your relationship to acting change, coming out of this?

It made me love acting again. 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 shitty experiences.

This gave me an opportunity to, as an adult, come back with some agency. When it’s at its best, this is the greatest job in the world. You’re basically playing all day. And I am used to directing now, where you’re carrying so many different threads of responsibility at the same time.

So did this make you want to act more?

I definitely wouldn’t rule out acting again. I don’t think I’m going to go into turbo-pursuing acting right now, but I would absolutely be open to it in the future. Filmmaking just takes so much time that sometimes, logistically, it can be difficult. But yeah, I never thought I’d really be open to acting again, and now I am.

Seth and Evan codirected this episode. As someone who’s directed Seth, what was it like being directed by him, particularly within the one-take conceit?

They didn’t have many days to do it, and we were often just rehearsing all day, and then you start shooting when the sun starts to go down, and then you’ve got a couple of hours. That’s a pretty terrifying proposition as a director, and I just felt like he was amazing at never letting the stress get to him.

My favorite thing I’ve actually ever seen on a set was that last part, where the camera is chasing us down the hall, and then it goes down the driveway and it chases Seth —and then he gets an iced coffee in his face. And the camera goes and has to land on the windshield exactly straight and then carry them in a driving shot. I was like, How the hell are they ever going to do this? It took about 22 takes and over two days to get the camera to not be slightly tilted when it landed on the windshield. I watched Seth at magic hour as we were losing the light. You couldn’t see anything at a certain point; a giant coffee thrown in his face and soaking him. It started to get cold out. He’d yell “cut” and know that it was a useless take, 22 times.

The third time it happened, I saw a moment where he had his hand on the car door handle, and I saw him on the verge of getting frustrated. Then I saw him take a breath and start laughing uncontrollably, and then he just kept laughing. I remember going, “How are you being so good-natured about this?” And he said, “I wrote this fucking thing. I fought very hard to have this fucking thing happen to me. Who am I going to be mad at? Who am I supposed to be mad at?” It’s amazing how many directors don’t ask themselves that question. Who are you going to be mad at? You literally invited this chaos. To have that perspective in the moment and to only find it funny, but to pivot toward having a normal human response, I felt like I learned a ton from watching him.

I’m sure being on the other side of it was wild, because in the time since you’ve acted on camera, you’ve become such a force of a director.

I kept sitting down behind the monitor. It was like a Pavlov’s dog thing. We’d cut and I’d go sit behind the monitor, and then I go, “Oh, so sorry!” And I’d get back on my mark. It was so habitual and strange. I was like, Why do I keep going by the monitor? It was so embarrassing.

I don’t think you’ve made films that face this kind of studio interference, but was it familiar at all to you?

As a director, I’ve only had unusually good experiences. As a kid on sets, I saw how demonic and problematic studio execs can be. [Laughs] I was on Baron Munchausen. It was famously terrible in terms of the studio. My introduction to Hollywood was not a good one. But all of my films have been independent except for Women Talking—and there I had Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who couldn’t understand film and filmmakers more. I couldn’t muster a single complaint about that experience if I tried. But it was easy for me to imagine how upsetting and how destabilizing it would be to have a studio executive come on your set and wreck it, because I have seen it as an actor for sure.

Reports did have you attached to direct Disney’s Bambi live-action movie at one point. What happened there?

I was never actually officially attached to it. I had one or two conversations about it, but there was no deal, I’d never signed on to it, so it was more of an internet phenomenon than a real thing. I did talk to them, but I was just working on a bunch of other things that I ended up being more focused on. I do think it’s a super-interesting thing to remake that movie, actually. I was also really interested in the mother-dying-young aspect of it. I could have delivered something very bleak. [Laughs]

And you mentioned picking Seth’s brain about your awards season movie idea, which I’m personally very invested in. Are you still working on it?

[Nods] Mm-hmm. I’m working on a few things that I’m not totally ready to talk about yet, but that I’m very excited about—and I’m hoping to make all of them.

Last question: Where are you keeping your Oscar?

It seems to move around every day because my kids put it in various poses in different scenes. Yeah, I never know where my Oscar is. It’s not in my domain. [Laughs] It’s been left with my children.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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