Seth Rogen on going from onscreen slacker to studio boss: ‘People really do scream at each other in Hollywood'

The Guardian

22-03-2025

Seth Rogen is itemising all the ways in which, when he's producing a film or TV show, he's inclined to agonise about his contribution. 'Are my notes helping?' he says. 'Am I making things worse? Am I actually inspiring the writers to create better things? Or am I imposing my outdated vision? Will they think spending time with me is a worthy use of their time?' And the big one – the one that, when he's working with his heroes, as he did recently on The Studio, a new TV comedy Rogen has produced, directed, co-written and starred in, and which features cameos by, among others, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese – really keeps him awake at night: 'Do they like me?'
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It is a very Rogenish thought spiral: neurotic, self-deprecating, delivered with the tremulous comic undertone that characterises most of his speech. Since the devastating fires in LA in January, it is also the kind of moan, Rogen says, that has to be prefaced in Hollywood by an awkward new protocol. 'Whenever you talk to anyone, the first thing you do is check, like, before we get too far into trivial subjects, did you recently lose all your worldly belongings? Before I whine to you for 20 minutes, it'd be good to know.'
Did Rogen lose anything? 'I did not, thank God.' He laughs his famous, wheezing laugh that sounds like a van trying to get up a hill. 'So be as trivial as you like.'
I suspect Rogen, who is 42, can get away with a great deal more whining than most people in Hollywood purely by virtue of the firm and affectionate idea of him we have from his movies: funny, nerdy, beardy, affable, Canadian, for God's sake, a man whose side hustle is running a weed business and making ceramics. He is speaking via video call from the LA production office of Point Grey Pictures, the company he runs with Evan Goldberg, his writing and business partner of 30 years, which, according to IMDb, has a whopping 16 projects in the works – though, Rogen says, with assiduous self-ridicule, 'a lot of that may not be real'. Still, his recent output has been terrific. The TV comedy Platonic, which just shot its second season for Apple and in which Rogen stars opposite Rose Byrne, is a pitch-perfect rendition of friendship in middle age. The Boys and Gen V, teen superhero comedies for Amazon, were funny and well received. Even the old stuff bears up, just about. Knocked Up, the 2007 comedy in which he co-starred with Katherine Heigl, tried to persuade us a twentysomething babyman is not, by today's standards, a shirking nightmare but a cute creature, and the film, along with Pineapple Express and Superbad, succeeds in large part thanks to Rogen's persona. It's a misleading emphasis, because he is now at least as successful as an executive as he is as an actor and writer. At one point, while discussing the intricacies of the movie industry, he says casually, 'Like, we very rarely don't get what we want.'
Getting what you want – and the old question of art versus money – is the subject of The Studio, in which he plays Matt Remick, freshly appointed head of a fictional movie studio called Continental. He's a classic Rogen character: well meaning, shambolic, full of big ideas and poor execution. Remick's appointment coincides with the steep decline of the movie business in favour of television, something 'we thought was funny – a show about saving film where the only way you can tell that story in a well resourced way is on television'. And it is a well resourced show, shot with a dreamy, golden-hour filter designed to evoke Hollywood's heyday and stuffed with cameos pulled from Rogen's contacts list: Charlize Theron (with whom he starred in the 2019 comedy Long Shot), Paul Dano (the 2023 movie Dumb Money), Zac Efron (the 2014 frat-house comedy Bad Neighbours), Adam Scott (who appeared in Rogen's road-trip comedy of 2012, The Guilt Trip), Olivia Wilde and Steve Buscemi. Rogen acknowledges that, unlike a behind-the-scenes show such as Extras, in which Ricky Gervais skewered the movie industry via the people on set with the least power, focusing on the studio head is risky. But it works, he believes, because most people can identify with a delusional boss – in this case, one who fights to maintain his integrity in the face of people who 'don't truly give a shit about movies'.
'We talked a lot about The Office,' Rogen says, 'which I love, and how the boss is the most tragic figure on the show. Just because you're at the top of the power structure, it doesn't mean you're less relatable or funny.'
The difference between The Studio and The Office, of course, is that the latter wasn't conceived as a 'love letter to the paper industry', while the former is infused with absolute faith in the communicable charm of the glitzy world it inhabits. Rogen says they were aware of the dangers of self-indulgence: 'We took great care to make sure the comedic premise itself was relatable to anyone watching.' In one episode, Remick goes on an absurd journey to try to force Zoë Kravitz into thanking him in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. 'I think people with regular office jobs have that feeling of, 'Oh! There's a presentation I helped on and the person giving it isn't going to acknowledge I helped on it!''
It is an arresting fact about Seth Rogen that he has never had a regular office job; he started in show business at the age of 13, doing standup in his home town of Vancouver. By 17, he'd been cast in Judd Apatow's single-season TV comedy Freaks and Geeks. By 22, he and Goldberg were writing jokes for an Emmy-nominated comedy and on the brink of breaking into Hollywood as serious comedy writers. The pair met at the age of 12 when they attended the same barmitzvah class and they both went to Point Grey secondary school, which would later lend them its name for their company. Even now, more than two decades after leaving for LA, some of Rogen's likability – the sense that he comes at Hollywood from a slight angle – feels connected to these Canadian origins. When I ask if he'd enjoy belonging to Trump's 51st state, he says, deadpan, 'I'd rather not.'
Rogen's relatability is also connected to his parents, Mark and Sandy, who worked for a nonprofit and as a social worker, and whom he has called 'radical Jewish socialists'. Neither believed in a 'career path' as such, and while Danya, Rogen's older sister, is also a social worker, his parents remain baffled by the son they've produced: a highly driven, success-oriented individual who has made a ton of money. 'They think I'm a fucking nerd,' Rogen says ruefully. His dad also 'views me as a suit'. He doesn't agree: 'I was just very fortunate in that my passion had a job ascribed to it, that I could find a way into at a relatively young age.' Things could have ended up very differently: Rogen got into pottery early, too, and 'there's not a lot of gold at the end of the pottery rainbow'.
In the mid-90s, he and Goldberg quit high school to move to LA where, after Rogen's short stint in Freaks and Geeks, they spent a few years trying unsuccessfully to sell the scripts for Superbad and Pineapple Express. This is as close as Rogen's been to the wilderness. The pair had just started to discuss moving back to Canada when Apatow recommended them to Sacha Baron Cohen, then writing the US version of The Ali G Show which, Rogen says, was then the 'coolest show' on TV. At 22, they became not only joke writers for Baron Cohen but sort of cultural translators for a newly transplanted Briton in the US. 'We told Sacha what 'spring break' was. We were like, 'You can go to spring break'; he said, 'How do you go to spring break?! It's a time, not a place!' So we went to Miami Beach.' This discovery by Baron Cohen would ultimately lead to Borat's mankini. Ali G was nominated for an Emmy, and Rogen and Goldberg were launched in LA. (He's still good friends with Baron Cohen – 'I saw him two days ago.') Within a few years, both the movie scripts Rogen and Goldberg had been hawking were made and they were earning millions.
Given the modesty of his background, does he ever feel squeamish about the money? 'I don't feel that bad about it.' He laughs. 'I came from no money. I help a lot of people with mine, so I feel relatively unburdened.'
The question of goodness and what it means to be a valuable member of society is one Rogen goes after in The Studio. In his favourite episode, his character starts dating a paediatric oncologist played by Rebecca Hall. The couple go to a medical fundraising gala where he gets into a fight with the doctors about whether curing child cancer is inherently more worthwhile than making fart jokes in movies. It seems to me Rogen's character argues his corner with real conviction; he concedes it's a sensitivity that comes from real life. 'I'm involved with an Alzheimer's charity' – Rogen's wife lost her mother and grandparents to the disease – 'and we go to a lot of medical galas, and I've been bothered by how little regard doctors have for what I do for a living.'
Yikes. 'Yeah,' he says. 'They're so unimpressed by me. And I know it's a comedically incorrect mental place to be, and I understand I'm wrong, but I would go home and say I feel I deserve to be on the same level as these people. Because if you make movies, you convince yourself you're doing the most important thing in the entire world. It's not true, but the illusion is very convincing.' In the show, Remick is driven so mad by a lack of respect from the medics that he 'would rather not have a relationship with Rebecca Hall than acknowledge that what doctors do is more important'.
Rogen is married to Lauren Miller, an actor and screenwriter, whom he met through a producer on The Ali G show and with whom he's been for 20-odd years. His apparent uxoriousness stands in contrast to some of Apatow's other male prodigies, among them James Franco, who was accused by female students on his acting course of sexual misconduct (he denies the allegations), and Jonah Hill, accused by an ex of emotional abuse (about which he has made no comment). Last year, Franco, Rogen's old pal going back to Freaks and Geeks, expressed sadness that Rogen had dropped him after the accusations surfaced in 2018. 'I haven't talked to Seth,' he said in an interview. 'I love Seth. We had 20 great years together, but I guess it's over.'
Rogen won't comment, but his reputation as a wife guy is fairly solid. He and Miller don't have children and he has become an unofficial spokesperson for that decision – which is unusual, I say; it's generally women who are held to account for whether or not they have kids. 'It's about time!' he laughs. It was even a storyline in Platonic, a show written by Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller in which Rogen's childless character, Will, is subjected by an old friend to the assumption he will be interested in photos of her kids. 'Yup,' he says, flatly, as she holds up her phone. 'There they are.'
Rogen says he and his wife talk about it a lot – not the decision, but the extent to which it remains curious to others. Obviously, he says, 'it's much more loaded for my wife – the number of people who talk to her about it versus talk to me about it.' Rogen is baffled by this: 'If anything, I'd have thought there'd be more questions about why people do have kids. Choosing to bring a child into this world we live in is a much more confounding choice in many ways than choosing not to.'
A few years ago, Rogen wrote Yearbook, a collection of memoir-ish essays he undertook because Goldberg was off having his second kid. Did he resent his writing partner for being unavailable, making different choices? 'No! One of the keys to our long-lasting relationship is that we're very understanding and accommodating of one another. There have been times when he's wanted to work on something and I'm gonna go act – I have a whole other job he doesn't do that takes me away from the job we do together. I'm constantly making choices that make me inaccessible to him.' So Goldberg going off to have another kid was as morally neutral to Rogen as if he'd been off making a movie? 'Oh, I'd be way more mad if he was shooting a movie without me.'
Can a trashy movie, expressly made to make money, actually be any good? This is the question that underpins The Studio, and Rogen has an answer for it. Two years ago, he and Goldberg wrote the script for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and, he says, 'I think we made a great film – not a cash grab, but something resonant, and funny, and exciting. And the people at Paramount let us do it.' He can think of other versions of this: 'I love a lot of the Marvel movies. And Barbie is a perfect example: you could've made the dumbest fucking movie in the world out of Barbie, but instead someone was like: what if we let it be good? If you're a good studio head, you let it happen. If you're one who's not confident enough to do that, they'll make the most middle of the road, easy to digest version of it.'
In Hollywood, middle of the road often wins out because miscalculated risk can be career-ending. Meanwhile Rogen's own success as an executive who does take risks suggests powers of persuasion so fine he should be running the UN. 'I think my diplomatic skills are more of a blunt instrument than a fine scalpel. But what we've gotten better at is choosing our battles; learning when to make a big deal out of something and when to let it go.' The fact is, he says, 'If you're passionate, conflict will arise. I was brought up in some of the most outwardly conflict-filled environments you can imagine in the industry – the first show I was on, Freaks and Geeks, was a great show, and the network hated it, and I got to listen to these conversations where everyone was fucking screaming at each other.'
This is not, he says, an exaggeration: 'People really do scream at each other in Hollywood. Friction is just part of the process.' And when things fail? 'The Interview would come to mind as a thing that went … I would say poorly.' This was the Sony movie in which Rogen and James Franco starred as two hapless TV hosts sent by the CIA to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong-un and that, through a series of improbable events, resulted in the Sony email hack that revealed toxic and racist remarks in company emails that went on to bring down Amy Pascal, the head of the studio. Sony cancelled its cinematic release, citing security concerns; Rogen and Franco cancelled their promotional interviews. Rogen shrugs. The only lesson to take away, he says, is that these scandals get old very quickly. 'Now that movie is on basic cable at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon – it's like any other comedy movie you see on TV: it's like The Rock at noon, The Interview at three, Con Air at four.'
Still, he's been actively seeking out gentler pursuits of late. Earlier this year, he lent himself to the Canadian spin-off of the UK show The Great Pottery Throw Down, a kind of Bake Off but with clay. Save for a few 'unsavoury personalities', he says, the pottery world is 'very welcoming and communal … And the entertainment industry is the complete opposite, where people are like, 'How much money will I make from this interaction and if the answer is not enough, I'm ending it right now.'' Unlike reality shows such as Top Chef, which Rogen loves for their 'very American energy – pitting people against one another for a huge, life-changing prize' – in Pottery Throw Down 'you don't win anything! You'd think that would make it less competitive, but in a way it's more compelling because you are seeing a group of creative people trying to create their best work.'
For different reasons, his weed company and the products it promotes offer Rogen similar respite from the movie business. Houseplant is an online boutique he set up in 2019 that sells cannabis products and accessories, including a 'standing ashtray' in bronze and walnut for $295, and a $95 'glass grinder'. Some of the products are ceramics he has designed. Rogen has spoken often of the beneficial effects of weed on what he has called his mild Tourette syndrome and ADHD. What I don't understand is how being even mildly high the whole time doesn't affect his productivity? 'Some strains do put me to sleep,' he says. 'Just not the weed I smoke all day.' Public safety announcement: this makes Rogen very unusual. 'For sure I process it differently than other people do. I've been at parties with people and we'll share a joint, and I'll be fine and go about my day, and they'll enter, like, a new dark period for three months. Years will go by and then I'll run into them at a party and they'll be, like, 'The last time I saw you was the last time I smoked weed, and it was terrible.''
Rogen starts to laugh. 'I'm not physically gifted in many ways, but there's one way in which I am, which is in my ability to process weed. And to me it's a very therapeutic part of my day to day journey which I don't even question or think about any more, honestly.'
You should leave your body to science. 'Oh, I will.'
What's interesting is that Rogen, with what looks like a reflex instinct for commerce, has turned his hobby into a booming business which is venture capital backed, has 36 employees and has just expanded into THC-infused drinks. Between that and the number of shows and movies he has coming down the pipe, it looks as if he's having some kind of mid-life … 'Manic episode?' He laughs. 'No. I've found ways to become productive in concentrated bursts. I'm good at focusing.'
In any case, he says, while it took a few years to get going, their production company is running so smoothly these days, 'me and Evan have a lot of time to focus on individual projects and I think that helps. His kids are a little older now, which gives him more time to work. And I work the same amount as everyone else; you know, 10am to 6pm, and when we're filming, 9am to 9pm.'
And at the weekend? 'On the weekends, I don't do shit.' Through the usual combination of luck and hard work, as well as Rogen's peculiar genius and the pass afforded certain types of celebrity, his life at the moment is very good. Rogen grins. 'On the weekends I watch Reacher and smoke weed.'
The Studio airs on Apple TV+ from 26 March.