7 Best Sal Saperstein moments from The Studio that made you laugh out loud

Sal Saperstein, played with gleeful mania by Ike Barinholtz, is one of the shining lights in Apple TV+’s famous Hollywood satire, The Studio. He is the vice president of production at Continental Studios, the chronically insecure longtime pal of Matt Remick, who boldly epitomizes the absurdity and anxiety of Hollywood insiders. Sal is not an auteur; he is the one who understands budgets, hides his mistakes, drinks, and sometimes snorts his way through high-stakes studio drama. He exists somewhere in a grey area between choosing safe bets and ironic arrogance, but always with a smile on his face that makes every flaw all the more laughable and lovable. Here are the 7 best Sal Saperstein moments from The Studio that made you laugh out loud.

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Burrito + golf cart chaos (Episode 5)

Hollywood big shots face light rivalry with resulting chaos. On the surface, it’s a familiar tale of backbiting and backstabbing, but Sal Saperstein (played by Ike Barinholtz) and Quinn Hackett (portrayed by Chase Sui Wonders) take their power struggle from the back office to a literal clash of the titans, all sparked by a burrito and a golf cart. When Quinn spitefully takes the assistant’s golf cart to claim Sal's coveted parking place, Sal tries to retaliate in the most ridiculous way possible: he pilfers Quinn’s burrito (a quesarito, to be precise) and throws it at her. She dodges, and the burrito whacks an assistant director who is driving the cart and slams him into a Netflix miniseries set of “Waterloo,” bringing the whole production into total ruin. The humor in this scene is classic slapstick as we see a bunch of Hollywood types behaving like high school kids over a parking spot and a fast food item. But somehow it becomes one of the most hilarious moments on Television. Backstory: The burrito-throwing scene was supposedly based on a true story about a producer who was angry with his burrito order being wrongly placed. In an interview with IGN, The Studio's co-creator Alex Gregory said,

“My wife was a PA on a sitcom that I shall not name, where a PA got the wrong burrito order. An Executive Producer of the show hurled the burrito at the PA. Fortunately, it hit the wall.”

To put it briefly, this Sal Saperstein moment is a fantastic and exaggerated mini glimpse of the taste The Studio offers with its petty office dramas and wild physical comedy.

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Sal faking grief (Episode 3)

Among the most hilarious moments in The Studio, and perhaps the most cringe-tastic of them all, is the one that occurs in Episode 3, involving Sal Saperstein being talked into a ridiculous mission to fake losing a relative, all in hopes of emotionally manipulating Ron Howard into eliminating the much too lengthy and painful motel sequence in his film, Alphabet City. The members of Continental Studios appear satisfied with the rough cut of Ron Howard’s Alphabet City, apart from the sluggish, poorly timed motel scene at the end that is not just hated by the test audiences but also by the exhibitors. The only way out is to remove it from the movie entirely. However, Matt Remick stalls, as he is too afraid to criticize the man he admires so deeply, especially after being publicly roasted by Howard for feedback he gave years ago on his movie, A Beautiful Mind. That is where Sal comes in with his Operation Fake Cousin. When it is confirmed that Howard wrote the sequence as his tribute to a cousin who recently passed away, Sal is sent in to pretend that he's experienced something similar and bond with the director. He makes an embarrassing contrivance of an imaginary cousin and attempts to sound sincere. Now, Howard starts talking so emotionally about loss and mourning that it makes Sal tear up about a cousin that never even existed in the first place. The irony in the scene is on the next level: Sal is ruefully weeping over a made-up tragedy just so the studio can deliver a note to Howard on his movie. He might not even have succeeded in changing Howard's mind, but the combination of clumsy lies and unadulterated cringeworthy comedy makes the entire situation hysterically funny.

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Buddy‑cop panic at Olivia Wilde’s missing reel caper (Episode 4)

Matt Remick is really excited to work with Olivia Wilde in her film, Rolling Blackout. When one of the ten reels, with a complex third-act shoot-out and a fan-favorite cameo moment of Wilde herself, gets misplaced, Sal comes to the rescue of Matt in order to salvage the project. In episode 4 of The Studio, we get to experience a noir-style mystery plot, but it’s more funny than serious. Matt is dressed in a 1940s gumshoe getup with his trench coat and voice‑memo narration, while Sal is his nervous, neurotic sidekick. The detective instincts of Sal are absolutely riotous. A sniff of alcohol is all it takes for him to uncover the truth. They find out from one of the crew members that Wilde forced Zac Efron to perform 40 takes of wearing a hat, for which he was on the brink of losing his shit. The investigation evidently turns into a parade of Hollywood cliches. They go to Chateau Marmont, look into Efron’s trailer, and find suspicious envelopes of money, in addition to tailor-made hats, where they had expected to find the reel. They then detect fake wrist-tattoo extras, among whom is Wilde herself. As Matt and Sal confront Wilde at the Hollywood Sign, she confesses that she stole the reel in order to get a reshoot, but then she goes out of her way to destroy it by unspooling the reel down a hill. The cinematic shot is all so extravagantly Chinatown but entirely comical. Sure, the helmsman of this melee is Sal. He puts up with Matt’s obsessions, avoids blame, and keeps the room chilled with his intimidating aura and biting wit. What is more, it is the scene when Ike Barinholtz truly allows havoc to creep into every word. It’s also where Ike Barinholtz keeps the madness alive through every word he delivers.

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Sal supporting Matt at a single‑take shoot of Sarah Polley's film (Episode 2)

When Sal follows Matt to the set of Sarah Polley for a so-called “magic-hour oner,” we get a clear indication that something is going to go terribly wrong. The well-intentioned cameo turns into a comedy of errors in no time. Throughout the episode, Sal attempts to help Matt avoid trouble by advising him to keep things low‑key. Matt, however, disregards all the hints, almost somersaulting the whole production. About right at the beginning of the episode, Sal says, “Oners are so stupid … Audiences do not care about this shit,” which ironically sets the entire tone. As Matt screws up shots by talking during scenes and clumsily hurting himself, Sal tries to hold it together. He pretends to be calm, but his expression makes it clear that he knows the shoot is doomed since they are losing light and precious time. In a moment when Matt’s car blocks the exit route of the lead actress, it is hilarious to watch Sal standing stoically while the situation grows out of control. In short, the humor in this episode is rooted in Sal’s reactions. His combo of loyalty, horror, and repressed frustration really seems to bring out the comic strain.

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Golden Globes meme moment (Episode 8)

Matt, in this episode, is heartily seeking validation, and it comes hilariously into conflict with his lovable, laid-back friend and VP of production, Sal Saperstein, when he surprisingly becomes the unwitting star of the night. It all starts when Sal’s old friend Adam Scott takes home the Best Supporting Actor award, and in his thank-you speech, he mentions Sal’s name besides Netflix and Ted Sarandos. Scott shared that Sal was a good friend to him back in the days and had benevolently allowed him to crash in his apartment when he was struggling at the beginning of his career. Now this was supposed to be random, unscripted, and completely harmless, except that it sparked a meme out of nowhere, all in Sal’s favor. After this, celebrities throughout the event began to blindly participate in it. Quinta Brunson, Jean Smart, and Aaron Sorkin all got up on the stage during their turns and thanked Sal. In the meantime, Matt is filled with envy and incredulity. It is pure slapstick satire: everyone is grateful to Sal the nobody, and Matt, the movie-maker, is left in the dark. This scene in The Studio is both roaringly funny and exquisitely human at the same time.

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Ensemble casting meeting fiasco (Episode 7)

When The Studio finally brought all its actors together in Episode 7, aptly titled Casting, things had to go about as awry as possible to give the get-together a comedic twist that made a suspected routine meeting turn into an all-out brass bounder. The issue? Choosing the correct cast to do the Kool‑Aid Man film without causing the social media to have a meltdown. When Matt insists that Ice Cube voice the classic character, Quinn abruptly says that Kool-Aid is a poor man’s drink. The comment makes everyone panic, and the team attempts to rectify the situation by ensuring that all the voice actors are Black and all the live-action characters are White, to somehow, strangely, appeal to the U.S. demographics. Sal, seated right in the middle of the chaos, tries to make sense of the panic in the studio and the disintegrating political correctness, his frustrated looks and blank expressions being the perfect comedic fillers. The icing on the cake is when Ice Cube actually takes the stage; we see Sal utterly speechless, shocked, with his mouth hanging open, as he attempts to grasp the ridiculousness of Hollywood’s over-the-top efforts to seem woke. In this scene, Sal plays the role of the confused voice of reason, and his reaction creates one of the best laughs of the season.

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The Scorsese meeting (Episode 1)

Martin Scorsese stops in to pitch an epic, $250 million movie about the Jonestown massacre to Matt Remick and demands that the title be: Kool-Aid, in an attempt to make the true story more synonymous with the infamous slogan. Matt is starstruck, and at first, he approves the script and title in an attempt to earn credibility; little does he know that the move will breed catastrophe. Soon Matt panics. During a party with Charlize Theron and other people, he tells Scorsese that he had purchased the script with the sole interest of shelving it, as it would've been a commercial resistance to the studio. Then comes in Sal Saperstein, Matt’s right-hand man, always jittery and loyal. As Scorsese finds himself in a shocked silence as the party turns into chaos, Sal leans close and blurts in a shaky whisper the startling words, “I love The Departed.” The soft-panic: part admiration, part fear, along with faked solidarity-hits home so spot-on that you crack up partly in support of it, partly because it lacks any defensive filter at all.