Craig Mazin

Craig Mazin is an American screenwriter, director, and producer whose career has moved from broad studio comedy to prestige television. He was born on April 8, 1971, in Brooklyn, New York, and studied English at Princeton University, graduating in 1992. Mazin first became widely known for writing the screenplay for Scary Movie 3, released in 2003, and for subsequently co-writing Scary Movie 4, which arrived in 2006. These films placed him inside the deliberately exaggerated spoof tradition, but they do not represent the full range of his later work as a filmmaker and showrunner, especially in television and film alike.

Mazin later wrote or co-wrote several mainstream comedies, including Superhero Movie (2008) and The Hangover Part II (2011). He also received screenplay credit on Identity Thief (2013), starring Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy. His most consequential early television work was not a scripted series but his long-running podcast Scriptnotes, which he co-hosts with screenwriter John August. The program discusses screenwriting craft, industry practice, contracts, and film development, giving listeners detailed conversations about how scripts are constructed and sold. Mazin has also used the show to address professional ethics and workplace behavior, making it an unusually specific record of his views.

His breakthrough as a television creator came with Chernobyl, a five-part HBO miniseries that premiered in 2019. Mazin created, wrote, and executive-produced the series, which dramatizes the April 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the Soviet response to it. Although it uses reconstructed dialogue and composite characters, the production was grounded in historical research and presented the catastrophe through figures including scientist Valery Legasov, portrayed by Jared Harris, and plant chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, played by Paul Ritter. Mazin wrote the Chernobyl Podcast to explain where the drama followed the record and where it compressed events.

That success led to Mazin’s collaboration with game writer Neil Druckmann on The Last of Us. The HBO adaptation, which debuted in January 2023, was co-created and co-written by them, with Mazin serving as a showrunner and executive producer. The series follows Joel Miller, played by Pedro Pascal, and Ellie Williams, played by Bella Ramsey, across a post-pandemic United States devastated by a fungal infection. Its first season adapts the story of Naughty Dog’s 2013 video game while expanding characters and episodes such as “Long, Long Time,” written and directed by Mazin. Chernobyl won an Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series.