Welcome to the Hotel That Never Quits
Initially, The Bubble may appear to be merely a comedy that deals with absurdity — a movie-within-a-movie, filmed during the pandemic. A group of stars in a blockbuster franchise arrives to an English hotel and quarantine for two weeks before filming begins for the next Cliff Beasts sequel. They are filming behind green screens, under the hotel quarantine protocols, and feeling the tension of being together yet apart. The situation feels chaotic and of the moment invoked satire. But, as the film progresses, the zaniness of the locked-room celebrity farce slowly unspools, revealing more profound layers: an insight commentary on the film industry and how it deals with shifts in crisis, collaboration, and ego.
Characters Beyond the Laughs
At the center of the farce is Carol Cobb, as played by Karen Gillan, an action-hero actress returning under pressure to Cliff Beasts, and after skipping the previous installment. She carries with her the unresolved feelings of guilt, and bad insecurity woven with the unlikely chances of hope for redemption. Guilt serves as an anchor to most of her co-stars too. Each brings their own: Leslie Mann’s Lauren, David Duchovny’s Dustin, a fragile ego, Pedro Pascal’s Dieter, Iris Apatow’s TikTok Krystal, and Vir Das the hotel owner in his role as a reluctant facilitator.
What may come off as caricature is still softened by a sense of vulnerability. Dieter may play the villain in Cliff Beasts 6, but off-camera, he is someone dealing with the turbulence of a mid-career crisis, the burden of being a public figure, and the hunger for true closeness. The return of Carol is not just about comedy, but what unfolds when ambition confronts shame in a world that feels stagnant but has the expectation of activity.
Even the hotel becomes a character: its corridors echo with enforced solitude, its restaurants host masked dinners, its spas double as confession booths. The artificial luxury of the set clashes with the anxiety behind closed doors.
When Reality Leaked Into Fiction
Fans expected a comic take on lockdown life — trailers teased awkward masked parties, green-screen chaos, and celebrity egos trying to stay sane. But many wondered: how much of this was drawn from real life? It turned out, quite a lot.
Director Judd Apatow based the film on accounts of the frustration and discomfort of various productions while navigating COVID restrictions. During the filming of productions, crews were quarantined together. Actors were required to be tested daily, while shooting schedules had to adapt to the health and safety protocols. This palpable tension seeped into The Bubble. It’s a film about actors trapped in a film—and also about actors who are stuck in a world in which the pandemic had barred them from stepping outside the restrictions.
During the press interviews, Karen Gillan and several of her colleagues talked about the on-set frustrations that inspired the ‘improvised’ moments of the film. The long hours in hotel rooms, the COVID protocols placed over the rehearsals, and even the absence of touch between co-stars shaped the movie’s awkward rhythms. The humour we see on screen—irritation, cabin fever, breakdowns—are a reflection of reality behind the lens.
Cracks Beneath The Surface
Despite the uneven tone—an amalgam of satire, romance, and meta-commentary—The Bubble remains, in part, a testament to creative exhaustion. Critics have noted this, and the film’s disjointed nature captures the reality of our world.
While filming reflected this derangement, it was particularly difficult under pandemic restrictions. Roughly blocking scenes, managing group shots, and scheduling crowd sequences became complex integrated processes avoiding crowds. Fragments of emotional sequences had to be performed and later stitched together during editing. Production could be halted for days because of a single cough detected on set.
The cast consisted of Hollywood veterans and a few newcomers, both of which had to grasp a differing approach to filming. New chemistry was embroidered under face shields. Shared meals became unsynchronized fragmented rituals. Coffee-time ‘shooting’ conversations and real life projects were replaced by Zoom when it was their turn to ‘shoot’ the scene. This disconnection is reflected poorly on the film, where the characters yearn for intimacy yet are spatially and emotionally walled off.
The reality of waning fame, particularly on the actors’ parts, filtered through the characters. Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, and David Duchovny, for instance, all experience lulls at varying extremes. Portraying characters with headlines scrutinizing their characters provided a unique self-aware irony to the roles.
Moments That Felt Too Real to Joke About
While filming The Bubble, the production team had to face its own set of challenges. Built under the shadow of the first major COVID comedies, the production team had to constantly adjust to new COVID schedules. Each department had to build their own COVID compliant rules.
Karen Gillan flew in from the U.K. and had to quarantine in complete isolation from the rest of the cast. This real-life isolation mirrors Carol’s emotional distance from her co-stars. Pedro Pascal had to film some of his scenes under time constraints set by other overlapping projects and that was exactly what his character was feeling — frantic energy.
Fred Armisen, who plays the eccentric director of the fictional Cliff Beasts 6, often improvised lines that directly voiced real-time frustrations on set — about delays, about clueless studio heads, about the burning world of art. The crew had to spend extra hours re-blocking scenes to comply with ventilation and spacing, which apparently led to spontaneous moments that made the final cut.
Symbolism in the story was unavoidable, even with minor technical issues. During the climactic dinner scene, a ventilation duct limited where the camera could be placed. Judd Apatow simply rewrote the scene to reflect the new changes and to portray a crowded, tense table — a visual metaphor for the suffocation caused by enforced proximity.
Fame in a Bubble
What The Bubble reveals is the pressure modern fame endures. The characters — and maybe the actors as well — must answer the interrogative, who am I when the audience is no longer watching? When the premieres are replaced by social media, and the red carpet is substituted by Zoom interviews, what remains of the glamour?
For Karen Gillan, who has played strong but socially awkward characters in the titles Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy, Carol is both a parody and a personal echo — a woman who must prove herself once again in a rapidly forgetting industry. For Pedro Pascal, who transitioned from character actor to global superstar, playing a man who is trapped in vanity and anxiety is an opportunity to exercise the very traps fame can impose.