Craig Mazin

Lore & Background

Mazin grew up on Staten Island and in New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University in 1992 with a degree in psychology. He began in the mid-1990s as a marketing executive at Walt Disney Pictures and made his screenwriting debut in 1997. His comedy credits include Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4, Identity Thief and the two sequels to The Hangover.

In 2011 he and the screenwriter John August started Scriptnotes, a weekly podcast about screenwriting. He had earlier served on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Reader's Guide

HBO and Sky announced the five-part series in 2017, and it aired in 2019 after filming in Lithuania and Ukraine. Mazin has said that the lesson of Chernobyl is not that modern nuclear power is dangerous, but that lying, arrogance and the suppression of criticism are.

He went on to co-create the series The Last of Us, again for HBO, with Neil Druckmann. He has said he imagined the network would at least show polite interest in another season about a different tragedy, such as Bhopal or Fukushima.

Did You Know?

• His freshman roommate at Princeton was Ted Cruz.
• His high school inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2010.
• He made a cameo appearance as a janitor in Superhero Movie.