In ‘The Franchise,’ Aya Cash Learned Dark Hollywood Secrets—and Applied Some Personal Experience Too

When Aya Cash first auditioned for The Franchise, she didn’t get the part. The You’re the Worst and The Boys star had experienced such rejection plenty of times before, but this particular project—of a pedigree including Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes and Emmy-winning Veep producer Armando Iannucci—proved hard to let go of. So hard, in fact, that she jumped at the chance to try again. “They ended up getting rid of that role that I had auditioned for and not gotten…and so they wrote [a new] role,” she tells me over Zoom. “Then an audition came my way again—and I’m a glutton for punishment, so I thought, Well, let’s go get another rejection!” Instead, Mendes personally offered her the part on a video call.

It’s the kind of Hollywood whiplash that The Franchise (premiering Sunday on HBO) depicts rather unsparingly. The series, created by Succession alum Jon Brown, is told through the eyes of a beleaguered crew working on a big-budget, green-screen-heavy comic book adaptation. The production is stuck in a crammed assembly line of releases planned by the fictitious Maximum Studios, whose problems resemble those of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe: diminishing box office returns, overworked visual-effects artists, auteur directors getting in over their heads. Cash portrays Anita, a producer who replaces her fired predecessor on the project and is swiftly placed in the impossible middle ground between executives and creatives. She dreams of using the project as a springboard to launch a boutique company and finally move on from the “franchise bullshit.”

The Franchise takes direct, satirical aim at the state of modern filmmaking, leaving no perspective behind. This includes its depiction of the movie’s stars (played by Billy Magnussen, Richard E. Grant, and Katherine Waterston), who navigate their dysfunctional industry’s enduringly warped understandings of everything from gender politics to set conditions to artistic value. Soon to be entering her third decade as a professional actor, Cash knows a thing or two about all of that too—perhaps that’s why her weathered, biting take on Anita rings so true. She had a lot of material to draw from—beginning, of course, with her rocky start on this very project.

Vanity Fair: I’m not sure how you generally take rejection, but did you feel any reluctance about jumping back in to audition for The Franchise again?

Aya Cash: To be brutally honest, I take all rejection horribly. It’s part of my job to be rejected, and yet I’ve never gotten good at it. I always take it personally. I’m always convinced it’s completely my fault, and I’m devastated. Going where you’re wanted is also a good MO. But sometimes with these jobs, you have to prove it. And the job that changed my entire life, You’re the Worst, I also didn’t get the first time around—I had been rejected by the network, and then Stephen [Falk] really fought for me. So I auditioned again and got it. I was never made to feel second-class or [like] I didn’t deserve to be there by the network, so it had worked out. Maybe that experience helped me go, Okay, well, let’s do it again.

As someone who’s worked in Hollywood for many years, what struck you about the content of this show as feeling particularly honest? What were you excited to dig into?

If you play tennis, you were super excited when Challenges came out. If you’re a potter, the Kelly Reichardt movie with Michelle [Williams], Showing Up, you’re like, Oh, it’s my thing! So to explore how the sausage gets made in Hollywood, you just feel like, Oh, I’m actually already the expert on this. People would not believe the craziness that goes on behind the scenes. It’s pure magic what you see on camera; it’s so composed and makes so much sense because behind the scenes it’s hundreds of people making this thing happen. It felt really special to also honor those people. You spend more time with crews than you do with your family often, because you’re working 15, 16 hours a day. To get to see those people represented also felt very special and exciting.

It also pinpoints many silly things actors have to do. What felt most familiar?