Daniel Bruhl thinks his Marvel friends will appreciate 'Franchise' humor

Inglourious Basterds, The Alienist and Captain America actor Daniel Bruhl says he wanted to play Eric, the anxious director in the HBO comedy, The Franchise, because it sends up a genre of filmmaking he knows all too well.

Wrapping up its first season Sunday on HBO and Max, the eight-episode show follows the cast and crew of a problem-plagued, big-budget superhero movie at a studio in England.

Himesh Patel plays Daniel, the production's long-suffering assistant director, while Billy Magnussen plays insecure action star Adam and Richard E. Grant plays Peter, the Shakespearean-trained stage legend who feels he is slumming it in a sci-fi blockbuster.

"It's self-deprecation," Bruhl, 46, told reporters during a recent round-table interview at New York Comic Con.

"I'm German and, so, we sometimes can learn from the English that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. So, for me, doing this show was incredibly refreshing," he said. "I think my friends at Marvel will laugh about the show."

Bruhl said he prepared to play his role by carefully studying Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes as he helmed the first episode of Franchise.

When Bruhl finally got to take over the video monitor from Mendes, it felt like "a knighthood," he added.

"Now, I'm a director. It made me feel very important," Bruhl joked. "I was actually watching what we were shooting and I was happy with three takes. But he shot 47, so he was so precise. And I was asking myself, 'What didn't he like?'"

Bruhl insisted he had nothing to do with jokes made in the show about Ron Howard, the nice-guy director he collaborated with in real life on the films Rush and Eden.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no," he said. "I asked many times if we could change the director [we mocked] and they said, 'Oh, no.' I was totally blaming Sam for that."

When Bruhl went to Australia to shoot Eden with Ron Howard, he "chose the right moment to tell him" he would be teased on the show.

Bruhl quoted Howard as saying, "Why would you do that?" to which Bruhl recalled telling him, "Because it's a comedy!"

Patel, 34, is known for his performances in Eastenders, Tenet and Station Eleven.

He plays Daniel, the first assistant director on the film within the show of The Franchise.

"He's in charge of making sure everything's running smoothly and everyone's happy, and we're on schedule, we're on the budget," Patel said.

"Sadly, we come in and they're 30 days over schedule, over budget," he added. "Things start going wrong very quickly when the studio starts tampering with the film."

Like Bruhl, Patel said he studied the show's crew to make sure his portrayal of an assistant director was on the mark.

"You feel a certain responsibility to reflect them correctly. So, I had a conversation -- when we shot the pilot -- with our first assistant, just to get an idea of what it takes to be a first AD, how he got to where he got to, but also his experiences working on a franchise and movies he had done," he said.

"We had, more or less, the very people we were trying to represent in front of us at all times," he added. "That was invaluable throughout."