Judd Apatow Name Checks Real-Life Agent in ‘Disaster Artist’

James Franco’s The Disaster Artist contains an Entourage level of Hollywood cameos — Bryan Cranston, Sharon Stone, J.J. Abrams, Zac Efron, Kate Upton, Kristen Bell, Bob Odenkirk and Danny McBride, to name a few. But true industry insiders will likely perk up their ears when a somewhat less famous name gets dropped during an L.A. restaurant scene.

Franco’s eccentric filmmaker Tommy Wiseau (a struggling actor before he conceived his magnum opus The Room) spots Judd Apatow — another cameo — across the room and decides to offer him a few rounds of Shakespeare to showcase what he believes is acting prowess.

A nonplussed and increasingly irate Apatow, dining with a female companion, fails to shoo his thespian acoster away, eventually telling him, “Just because you want it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” before going for the jugular. “It’s not going to happen for you, not in a million years,” he hisses.

However, in his initial failed attempts to dissuade Wiseau’s advances, Apatow invites him to send his résumé to UTA, specifically “to David Kramer.” Kramer, of course, is Apatow’s agent and a UTA co-president.

“I think it just came out,” Franco tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, I guess Judd was sort of playing a version of himself. He’s not quite a jerk like that, but it probably happens to him all the time.”

Kramer is not the first rep to have been dragged into the limelight. In fact, his name-drop comes hot on the heels of another, and even bigger, cameo for a UTA agent. In Netflix’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Sigourney Weaver’s agent Jeremy Barber appears in a scene at MOMA in New York.

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A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.