Seth Rogen Social Media Stats
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Seth Rogen and the Secret to Happiness
How the comedian (and director, writer, ceramist and weed entrepreneur) has made a career out of mining the pitfalls and possibilities of adolescence.
Credit... Chris Cadet for The New York Times
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Seth Rogen'southward home sits on several wooded acres in the hills to a higher place Los Angeles, under a canopy of alive oak and eucalyptus trees strung with outdoor pendants that light upwards around sunset, when the frogs on the grounds starting time croaking. I pulled upwardly at the front gate on a recent afternoon, and Rogen's vocalisation rumbled through the intercom. "Hellooo!" He met me at the bottom of his driveway, which is long and steep enough that he keeps a golf cart upwardly top "for schlepping large things up the driveway that are too heavy to walk," he said, adding, as if inconversable nearly coming off like the kind of guy who owns a dedicated driveway golf cart, "Information technology doesn't get a ton of utilize."
Rogen wore a beard, chinos, a cardigan from the Japanese brand Needles and Birkenstocks with marled socks — laid-dorsum Canyon chic. He led me to a switchback trail cut into a hillside, which we climbed to a vista point. Below u.s. was Rogen'due south office; the house he shares with his wife, Lauren, and their eleven-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Zelda; and the converted garage where they make pottery. I was i of the first people, information technology turns out, to come across the place. "I haven't had many people over," Rogen said, "because nosotros moved in during the pandemic."
Coyote manus prints pocked the trail. H2o burbled somewhere beneath us. Information technology was an idyllic scene disturbed only by Rogen's phone, which was vibrating madly with messages. That morning, Houseplant, the cannabis company he co-founded in 2019 in Canada, his native country, officially started selling its ain weed strains in California. Inside moments of the launch at that place was an hourlong expect to enter the web store, and presently the whole site crashed under the weight of Rogen-loving hordes clamoring to purchase what he described every bit his personally "manus-smoked" nugs. (The visitor also sells stoner abode goods, like a blocky, Bauhausian table lighter designed to be impossible to lose.) "Crazy day," he said, tapping at his screen. "I'g literally responding to people on Twitter, telling them we're working on it — doing my own client-service strategy, basically!"
Rogen's overwhelmingly coincidental demeanor — chucklingly amusing, continually stoned — has long belied his productivity: He has been working almost constantly since he was 13, when he started doing stand-up comedy around Vancouver. But it's yet piece of cake to mistake him for a less frenetically aggressive person. A few weeks earlier I visited, we scheduled a ix:30 a.m. video call, during which, right up pinnacle, I watched him lite a chubby joint. "I smoke weed all twenty-four hours," he said. "You lot'll encounter that when we're together." He punctuated this with a warm burst of laughter familiar to anyone who has spent 10 seconds in conversation with him: a low, gravelly cackle, like Chewbacca doing his best Fran Drescher.
Rogen was readying the release of "Yearbook," a humor collection he'd spent nearly three years writing. But on social media, besides some posts almost the book and most Houseplant, he'd mostly been making fun of Ted Cruz and posting pictures of his own trippy ceramic creations: undulating wide-oral fissure vases with speckled fluorescent finishes, nubby-glazed ashtrays with concave joint-holders affixed to their lips. And and so I'd gotten it into my caput that Rogen had downshifted into something of an early-retirement rhythm — the superstar comedian approaching heart age, shuffling betwixt his memoirs and his pottery wheels, with zippo left to prove and nothing peculiarly urgent to do.
I was wrong. "Right now I'one thousand writing ii movies with Evan," he told me, referring to his lifelong friend and collaborator, Evan Goldberg, with whom Rogen began writing screenplays in eighth grade and with whom he founded the production visitor Indicate Gray. "One'south called 'Escape,' which hasn't been announced and no one knows nearly, that nosotros've been working on for years, which hopefully we'll make next year. Then nosotros're writing this motion picture for Luca Guadagnino" — the "Phone call Me by Your Proper name" director — "nigh Scotty Bowers, this Hollywood hustler from the '40s. And we're producing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blithe movie." On top of these projects were two others, in different media, that he asked me not to name, and then there was Houseplant. "On a given twenty-four hour period I work on seven different things, probably, in little chunks," he said, then puffed on the articulation, shrugging. "But I don't have kids!"
At 39, Rogen himself remains admirably artless. A quarter century since he first fix pes on a comedy-club stage, he has somehow preserved the openness of that 13-year-sometime, never quite hardening into a settled form. "It's something I chase — that feeling of, Oh, this thing is working. Now this thing is working," he said. Rogen ready out knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life — brand people express mirth, smoke weed and hang out with his friends — and somehow managed to turn those 3 goals into the organizing principles of his whole career.
We descended the hillside, and Rogen got a call: The web store was support. "Fantastic," he said, swiping over to Twitter to share the news as nosotros strolled over to his pottery workshop. "Ceramics is something else that having kids would brand impossible," he told me. When the subject of childlessness arises in interviews, Rogen likes to half-joke that he and Lauren did the math and decided they'd rather non take kids, and enjoy a life of continued freedom and risk, peradventure regretting this decision for "a couple years earlier we die" than accept kids now, dislike the life modify tremendously and regret it for "the next l years."
The workshop smelled, unsurprisingly, dank. "At that place are probably some roaches sitting around," he said. Through Houseplant, and on his own, Rogen has advocated for expunging criminal records that stem from marijuana arrests, and he is heartened by the drug's steady pitter-patter toward legalization in the United States. He stressed that its illegality was "racist." He went on: "Information technology'south insane to abort people for something that never should have been illegal in the first place. Information technology's merely a manner to put Blackness people in jail."
Mark Rogen, Seth's male parent, told me that his son suffered from an undiagnosed attention-arrears disorder every bit a kid, until "the miracle of marijuana changed his life — we had him on a strict diet that helped proceed him in balance, but it wasn't 100 percent. Marijuana finally made his cells relax." Rogen compares his ain weed habit to wearing shoes: He could probably make it through a twenty-four hours without information technology, but "it's just non how I would prefer to be feeling." He acts stoned, he directs stoned, he does interviews stoned. Absent the cultural stigma around marijuana, Rogen said, "information technology's just a tool we utilise to brand our experience more than palatable, and some people need those tools a lot more than others. For me it'south similar shoes. For you information technology might exist like sunglasses. Not anybody'due south the aforementioned. If someone doesn't need to smoke weed? Great. It's the aforementioned every bit someone telling me they don't wearable spectacles. 'Mazel tov! You don't article of clothing glasses. I do!'"
The pottery studio was cluttered but make clean. There were three wheels and a kiln, and several worktables covered with test tiles for trying out new glazes, freeze-dried treats for Zelda and ceramics in diverse states of completion. Rogen'south pottery is good — sometimes astonishingly and then — and the images he posts online routinely generate hundreds of thousands of likes. "I've spent years working on movies that fewer people pay attending to than a vase I spent 40 minutes on," he said, laughing.
Rogen credited Lauren, who is also an actor and filmmaker, with encouraging him to endeavor ceramics. "She made all the stuff in our house," he said. Merely it was the belatedly Fifty.A. creative person Ken Price — best known for his gloopily biomorphic, wild-hued sculptures — who first piqued Rogen's interest in the form. "I went to his terminal testify at LACMA in 2012, the one Frank Gehry did the installation for," Rogen recalled. "It'southward the first time I saw ceramics and said, 'What the [expletive] is happening here?'" It was at this moment that Rogen noticed my T-shirt, which was printed with images of Toll'due south ceramics. "Where did that come from?!" he asked, delighted. "That'due south amazing. I need that."
Rogen has nerveless fine art for several years, with a focus on Pop and street art. In improver to a trove of vintage ashtrays he began amassing as a teenager, he showed me some painted sculptures by Barry McGee, figurines by KAWS and a large color cartoon by George Condo. With ceramics, Rogen establish a exercise that spoke to both the left and right sides of his brain. He flipped open a notebook in which he'd written the chemical breakdowns of diverse glaze recipes. "This reminds me of the photographic camera side of filmmaking, which is very scientific and technical, and which I actually empathise actually well," he said. "It'south funny, whenever information technology's revealed to someone that I know about cameras, they're surprised, and information technology'southward, like, I make movies!"
Rogen held upwardly a vase he'd glazed with a multitude of wormy Cronenbergian protuberances. "This one'southward gross," he said, non unlovingly. "But what I love about it is it makes you want to impact it." He showed me a more immediately pleasing one, with a saucer-shaped mouth and squat body he'd glazed with psychedelic swirls of dejection, greens, reds and oranges, evoking a gasoline rainbow. "Dazzler was not emphasized in the filmmaking climate that I grew upward in," Rogen said. "And nosotros were never trying to make our work beautiful. Nosotros were trying to make it feel real and accessible and grounded." He went on: "We were always trying to serve comedy, and beauty doesn't always serve comedy." Recently, he said, he'd started wondering what a beautiful Seth Rogen comedy might look like.
Rather than a hobby indulged in a vacuum, ceramics had become deeply enmeshed with Rogen's sense of himself as a artistic person — and had occasioned epiphanies he wanted to weave back into moviemaking. He talks nigh the meditative appeal of throwing dirt, and near the particular pleasure, for someone who works in the increasingly dematerialized "content" manufacture, of a creative endeavor oriented effectually tactile artifacts. Beyond this, he told me, ceramics offered him an outlet for experimental impulses that were harder to chase in his day task: Making movies, he oft felt that "there'due south too much coin involved to be truly experimental. When someone's given you $40 million, is that really the fourth dimension to exist trying things y'all're not certain are gonna work? But what pottery has shown me is there is actually a lot more experimenting nosotros could be doing." For example, "I was watching the making of 'Phantom Thread,' and Paul Thomas Anderson is trying out 300 different film stocks — information technology's not like Evan and I don't want to exercise that, but they don't let us exercise that. And we're probably not fighting hard enough to practice that."
Under quarantine, equally a kind of bonding do, Point Grayness started a virtual film club for its 13 employees. On occasion, directors and actors themselves joined video calls to hash out films they'd worked on: Amy Heckerling (who talked about making "Clueless"), James 50. Brooks ("Terms of Endearment"), Keanu Reeves ("The Matrix") and Nancy Meyers, among others. Ane week, Alfonso Cuarón popped in to talk virtually "Y Tu Mamá También," and something he said lodged in Rogen'south head. "He talked almost making that picture show afterward he'd made some large studio films," Rogen recalled. "And he said: 'With this one, we wanted to make the picture show we would take fabricated before we even went to moving picture school, as though nosotros knew zilch. Any idea we had, we would practice it, even if it seemed crazy or stupid or pretentious or whatever. Nosotros wouldn't recall about, Oh, it'south been done, or people will hate that, or that's too weird.'
"It was then cool to hear him talk well-nigh that," Rogen went on, "because — speaking to experimentation — he'd been locked into this matter where he was making big, expensive movies very early in his career, and then he kind of went back and said, No, this is what I want to do: Reset what I'grand known for and take insane swings."
Prototype
Rogen built his comedic persona around the prerogatives of boyhood in real fourth dimension: He started out telling summertime-camp and Jewish-grandparent jokes in his stand-upward act, improvising scenes on the NBC high schoolhouse sitcom "Freaks and Geeks" and co-writing what would become the 2007 smash striking "Superbad." Working on early drafts of that script in eighth grade with Goldberg, Rogen told me: "Information technology was, similar, we're writing our favorite motion-picture show of all time, considering it doesn't exist. At that place are movies nosotros similar, but there'due south no movie that's us, with all the things we specifically want out of a movie: It's about teenagers, they're trying to buy alcohol, they're trying to go laid, they're failing, at that place are cops, they're stupid. … "
This preoccupation has persisted into Rogen's adulthood, from his 2007 star turn in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," in which he played a xx-something dude jostled out of an extended boyhood past an unexpected pregnancy after a drunken hookup, to "Long Shot" (2019), in which he played a 30-something dude who shares an adolescent bond with a politician (Charlize Theron) and works to remind her of her youthful ideals even as she works to disabuse him of what she sees as his stubborn naïveté. Through Point Grey (named for the secondary school he and Goldberg attended), Rogen has put out "Skillful Boys" and "Blockers," wildly profitable R-rated teen comedies. Final year, he voiced a teenager on "Big Mouth." He has said that he envisions Point Gray'due south Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot every bit "a dandy activeness-adventure movie that's also a great teenage flick."
I asked Rogen what it was nigh youth he establish so compelling. "That fourth dimension in your life is very fertile for good stories," he said, "in the sense of lessons learned, things that are formative to you, things where you thought one thing so thought another. … " He mulled it over a bit more. "I think a ton most organization — that's a word, creatively, that comes into my head a lot. People crave stories because what stories practice is organize experiences in ways that make them make sense. Like, the world is very scary and chaotic-feeling," and youth is "the time in people's lives that feels it could utilize the most organizing. It'south the least-reconciled office of a lot of people'southward lives: 'What do I exercise with that?'"
Rogen devotes much of "Yearbook," which comes out next month, to organizing his ain early life. He began writing information technology two and a half years ago, he said, "when Evan had his second child and I had nothing to do for a few months." His goal wasn't to impart "life lessons," he emphasized, just to be an affable raconteur: Rogen's all-time movies feel similar great hangs, subsequently all, so why not make his writing feel the same way? Or equally he put it: "I read Steve Martin's book" — "Born Standing Up" — "and I was like, this is a beautiful memoir of one of the near influential people in comedy. That'due south not what I'm going for!"
Rogen got in touch with old classmates, some of whom he hadn't spoken to in ages, asking for permission to apply their names in the volume, and for their own recollections as well. "This guy Saul Moscovich, who is the guy I outset smoked weed with, I haven't talked to him since I was 17," Rogen said, "but it was funny getting his perspective on the first time we got high in the ravine behind our schoolhouse."
Rogen's adolescence in Vancouver was, in his telling, an essentially untroubled one — he remarks in "Yearbook" that his life has been relatively low on adversity and mercifully unmarred past tragedy. When he was growing up, Rogen says, his family "did not have a ton of money." This seems to have bothered him more than it did his parents, whom Rogen describes as resolutely anti-careerist "radical Jewish socialists." His mother, Sandy, worked as a cashier and later as a social worker. Equally part of his student advancement work at a local community college, Marker opened a game room, signing out table-lawn tennis paddles; after he worked for nonprofits. (Rogen has an older sister, Danya, who is now a social worker, too.)
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"Mark e'er said to our kids, 'Never practise annihilation just for the coin,'" Sandy told me recently. "We were very lefty, very socialist, and tried to instill that in them: 'You have to share.' We always had people living in our house. V or six people who had left their marriages and had nowhere to get, they came and lived with us and they weren't divide from united states of america — they were part of the family."
In addition to his childhood issues with attention, Rogen says he has a mild case of Tourette's syndrome. "I knew when he was 4 that he would non be able to sit in school," Sandy said, recalling Seth's "nighttime terrors and tantrums," which abated later on they put him on the doc-prescribed diet. "We took him off dairy, wheat, saccharide, yeast — everything good," she said. Nonetheless, until nearly seventh course, Mark said, they "spent about equally much time at his schoolhouse equally he did," summoned to the vice primary'due south function to discuss Seth'southward behavior. Rogen would fidget incessantly, leave his seat and interrupt class, antagonizing teachers. "He was actually smart and could have things teachers said and twist them confronting them," Mark recalled, "making the class laugh at them and embarrassing them." Sandy added that Seth would "brand some teachers weep — but 1 of his favorite teachers used to tell us she had to send him out of the classroom considering he was making her laugh and then hard."
Seth painted, drew and enlisted Sandy's aid in fashioning costumes. "He'd say, today I have to exist Batman, today I have to exist a cowboy, today I take to be Abraham Lincoln," she told me. Later Seth saw "The Terminator," Mark recalled, he made himself a stunningly elaborate "replica of the Terminator'south gun" using duct tape, electrical tape, paper-towel and toilet-newspaper rolls. "That gun was astonishing," Sandy said.
By high school, Rogen had mellowed significantly — he played rugby, studied karate and won a provincial title with the Point Grey improv squad. (The vivid comedian Nathan Fielder, it happens, was a teammate.) Only he remained an idiosyncratic kid who dyed his hair dark-green, wore a leather L.A. Raiders cap inspired by Ice Cube and, at 16, shared a subjectivity-obliterating eighteen-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms with Goldberg in a local forest known equally the Endowment Lands. "We lost our minds," he told me, adding that, in the years since, he has experienced shroom-abetted ego death "like, 25 times."
That same year, Rogen successfully auditioned for a role on "Freaks and Geeks," the cult loftier school serial created by Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. Mark and Sandy were each laid off from their jobs before the gig materialized, and Rogen has suggested that "if at that place was whatsoever kind of dark, driving force" behind his early ambitions, it was nigh likely his want for "some sense of fiscal security." He became the family unit breadwinner, but this didn't much alter the household dynamic, because his parents had long instilled in their kids an everybody-pitches-in mentality. Rogen remembers their spending a chunk of the gift money from his bar mitzvah on a washer-dryer. Sandy told me, "I experience slightly guilty that Seth felt whatever pressure level about coin" — then added, with a laugh, "Marker doesn't."
When I asked Rogen's parents if anything surprised them well-nigh the adult he became, Mark replied: "Information technology surprises me that he'southward such a workaholic! It's kind of like Alex Keaton" — Michael J. Trick'due south graphic symbol on "Family Ties" — "this thing where the family is lefty and the son is right-wing. We were so laid back! Sandy was home with the kids for vii years, and I had low-paying jobs, and we worked because we had to, not because it was our life's appetite. And now Seth is multitasking on 10 projects at whatsoever given moment." Seth laughingly acknowledged to me that he "might have gone in the complete opposite direction" of his parents, simply that, when it came to his career aspirations, "They never said, Hollywood is [expletive], vesture bare feet and frolic the fields. They said, If this makes you lot happy, do information technology."
All artworks are tethered to the moment of their making, but that's especially true of comedy, where the perspectives, references and rhythms that animate jokes can engagement them — sometimes fatally — far more readily than, say, an outmoded hairstyle. Lately, comedy's radioactive half-life has seemed to only accelerate, equally cultural attitudes surrounding sex, identity and privilege are renegotiated precipitously, and this is especially truthful of comedies situated as squarely as Rogen and Goldberg'due south take been in the earth of men.
Rogen has addressed this renegotiation in interviews, acknowledging that there are jokes he made at the start of his career that he wouldn't make today, and that he gain with more sensitivity now than he did in his 20s. He characterizes this non every bit a case of self-censorship merely as a particularly loftier-stakes example of what any comedian fundamentally wants to do, which is exhibit control over his or her textile: "I want to know when I am crossing the line, and I likewise want to convey to the audience, in some subtle style, that I'm aware of the lines," Rogen told New York mag in 2018. "Audiences go nervous when they don't trust that the filmmakers fully empathize what they're doing; y'all desire to know that the people making the offensive jokes sympathize what's offensive about them."
Films like "Superbad" and "Pineapple Express" meet this standard — for the most role. When the pubescent protagonists of the former issue idiotic declarations about the psychologies of the girls they captivate over, the movie makes information technology abundantly clear they have no idea what they're talking nearly. "Pineapple Express" (2008) includes a shadowy group of drug dealers referred to merely every bit "the Asians," in the Orientalist style of the lug-headed '80s activeness movies Rogen and Goldberg are pastiching. You can read this every bit a meta commentary on Hollywood racism, even if you debate its ultimate success.
At bottom, though, Rogen's movies are sweet, fumbling dearest stories nearly sweet, fumbling dorks, and this has helped them age well. In "Yearbook," we meet a poignant encapsulation of this sensibility. When Rogen was 12, he writes, inspired by the 1993 Val Kilmer western "Tombstone," he amassed a wardrobe of thrift-store vests that he paired with a pocket scout. Attending classmates' bar and bat mitzvahs, he describes how "a slow song would come up on, boys would ask girls to dance, girls would inquire boys to dance and I'd generally notice myself standing on the side watching it all happen, spinning my pocket watch like some sort of 1920s mafia snitch."
I weekend, hugging the wall at a bat mitzvah, Rogen noticed "two other guys as well standing on the sidelines, watching with longing as the other kids had fun." With a sinking feeling, he recognized himself in them. But then "I noticed two OTHER guys. They weren't standing on the side, watching with longing. They actually seemed like they wanted nothing to practice with the girls or the boys or the dancing or whatsoever of that." These boys — Evan Goldberg and Sammy Fogell (who would become on to inspire the character McLovin in "Superbad") — were happily picking up "discarded glow sticks, cut them open up and pouring the glowing noxious goop that was inside all over their hands," Rogen recounts. He went over and started swell open the glow sticks, too — he'd institute his people.
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Rogen captures something in this moment that'south both geeky and precious. Perched on the symbolic precipice of adulthood, troubled by hormonal disturbances, nascent anxieties and social pressures, three friends find prophylactic harbor in one another's company. It'south Rogen and Goldberg'due south origin story, reverberating throughout their creative partnership. "Our brains formed around working with one another," Rogen told me. "Your brain is not fully formed when you're 13, and that'due south when nosotros started sitting down to write together." Decades subsequently, he went on, "we've been able to keep that childlike energy of just working on the thing that you want to exist doing, the thing you want to watch, the thing that'due south really just for you."
In Danny Boyle's film "Steve Jobs," Rogen appears opposite Michael Fassbender, who plays Jobs, as a supportive merely aggrieved Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder. Even though Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, when Rogen is onscreen, y'all tin glimpse the Signal Greyness version of the movie: two mismatched bros — the inventor and the marketer — hanging out in a Cupertino garage, balancing shared affections and aspirations against festering resentments. In their films, Rogen and Goldberg honey nix so much as stories about friends whose abundant love for each other is tested — by ability imbalances between them, past weaknesses of character, past societal forces tugging them apart. This is the emotional engine at the core of "Superbad" (2007, an impending college departure threatens a friendship); "The Green Hornet" (2011, pampered arrogance threatens a friendship); "This Is the Terminate" (2013, Hollywood threatens a friendship); and "The Interview" (2014, diverging career goals threaten a friendship).
One of my favorite Rogen comedies is a bleak exception: Jody Hill's "Discover and Report" (2009), in which Rogen plays a reactionary mall cop with bipolar disorder, delusions of grandeur and no friends to speak of. Rogen's greatest script with Goldberg, "Pineapple Limited," which David Gordon Green directed, also inverts the typical construction: Among a life-threatening adventure, a friendship blossoms.
In "Knocked Upwards," Judd Apatow framed goofy adolescent bliss as an entertaining but ultimately stunted condition that Rogen's protagonist had to reluctantly outgrow. The picture show grossed $220 million and made Rogen an unlikely star. Simply in the films he has made with Goldberg, the advent of maturity is treated with more ambiguity, if not outright skepticism. In their easily, adolescence is not merely a phase of life merely a country of mind, where the exploratory, joyful fumbling of childhood has notwithstanding to give way to the compromises and conformities imposed on us past a fraudulent adult world. Goldberg told me that he and Rogen share a "philosophical aptitude" that stems from adolescence: "We're irked by people who say, 'This is how it should be, and I know what'southward correct.' No one knows what'due south right, the entire universe is madness. So people who proclaim to know how other people'due south lives should be lived irk the states — and those people tend to wait down on young people."
The most radical expression of this mentality comes at the end of "Sausage Party," a 2016 animated characteristic about anthropomorphic supermarket foodstuffs that have been taught paradise awaits them upon being purchased, and then notice the grim truth and rebel. Voiced past actors similar Rogen, Kristen Wiig and Salma Hayek, the heroes question the belief system that has kept them docile and, in the finale, become violent revolutionaries, massacring their oblivious human oppressors in the supermarket aisles earlier enjoying a wildly uninhibited pansexual victory orgy. Writing sequences like these, Rogen told me, he and Goldberg "will await at each other and say, I bet this is partially considering we did a lot of mushrooms when we were in loftier school."
"Whoa," Rogen said, checking his phone in the ceramics studio. The Houseplant web store was non merely back, but it was looking as if everything was going to sell out by day'southward end. "Part of me was, like, will anyone purchase this [curse]?" he admitted. "Similar, our movies cost $15 to go see, most people see them for free now. Will someone pay $100" for an ashtray and a vase?
For Rogen, Houseplant represented a "large swing" of the sort he liked hearing Cuarón champion. Rogen had taken to calling the cannabis company "his life's work," and he assured me he didn't mean this jokingly. "Information technology feels like something I'm more than uniquely. … " He thought for a second. "More people could make comedies than could do this," he said.
All the same, I asked if he was plotting some big cinematic swing too. "The thing with our movies is, nosotros're always trying to do that," he replied. " 'Sausage Party' was a big swing. As we were making 'This Is the End'" — a picture about the Rapture, set in Hollywood, in which Rogen and a host of other celebrities like Rihanna and Jonah Hill played versions of themselves — "we were maxim, this is an experiment." He laughed. "And and then I'd contend that 'The Interview' is an experiment that maybe went awry!"
"The Interview" is the second picture show Rogen and Goldberg directed, and it doesn't feel like much of an overstatement to say it had the most turbulent rollout in the history of Hollywood. The picture show is near a Ryan Seacrest-fashion TV host (James Franco), whom the C.I.A. enlists, along with his trusted producer (Rogen), to electrocute Kim Jong-un during an interview. Whatever putative stoner comedy where you find yourself rooting for C.I.A.-backed authorities alter deserves, at least, a hard sidelong glance, and if the film weren't so thoroughly lightheaded, you could argue that it is, on some level, pro-U.S. propaganda.
This was the vociferously held position of North Korea, at any charge per unit. Its state-news agency promised "stern" and "merciless" retaliation alee of the film's release, with the country's Un ambassador calling it "an deed of war" in June 2014. That November, later a historic cyberattack on Sony Pictures servers that the F.B.I. linked to North Korean hackers, thousands of internal company emails were leaked, leading to the resignation of Amy Pascal, the studio boss at the time. In a last-minute swerve, citing condom concerns, Sony yanked "The Interview" from theaters and gave it a streaming-only release (a rehearsal, it turned out, for pandemic-era upheavals in distribution).
Rogen was somehow able to accept all this in relative pace, even growing accustomed to the full-time security baby-sit hired to protect him. It was easier, it turned out, to abstract himself from geopolitical strife than from bad reviews. "What's painful," he said, "is the joy people seemed to take in deriding it," by which he meant "major publications who took the time to write articles that were, like, And by the manner, this pic sucks. Yes, it'southward the center of a major controversy, but don't let it exist lost on you that it's also terrible." Rogen laughed with a mixture of mirth and bitterness. The saga left him feeling "gun shy," he said. "It was something that for sure felt like we burned our easily on the stove. I don't think information technology's a coincidence that we oasis't directed a picture since."
Last July, Rogen plant himself at the center of a relatively more muted international controversy. During an interview with Marc Maron, Rogen articulated his conflicted thoughts nearly Israel — the country where his parents met, on a kibbutz, and where he traveled equally a teenager. Rogen told Maron that, growing upwards, he was "fed a huge amount of lies" about Palestinian claims to the land: "They never tell yous that, oh, by the fashion, there were people there," he told Maron. "They get in seem like information technology was just sitting there, like, the [curse] door'due south open." As for the basic notion of a Jewish state, he added, "You don't go along something you're trying to preserve all in one identify," specially not "when that identify is proven to exist pretty volatile, you know? I'one thousand trying to continue all these things prophylactic, I'm gonna put them in my blender."
Outcry followed, with some Jewish voices jubilant Rogen for speaking tough truths and other, more conservative ones denouncing him. The Maron interview, Rogen said, "put people in a funny state of affairs where they had to say I'm anti-Jewish, which is a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around." As a kid, Rogen attended Jewish solar day schoolhouse and Jewish summertime camps. Last year, after the death of his mother-in-law from Alzheimer's, Rogen developed a greater appreciation for what he calls Judaism's "practical" aspects. "When you look at what Jews do after death, you go to work, you get the torso together, you hang out together, you get food, you get booze: There's infrastructure in place to deal with these things that are truly difficult to deal with," he said. He was particularly struck by the stark certitude of one ritual in particular: "You bury the body yourselves," he said. "It'southward crazy — you're dumping dirt on the torso."
Rogen conceded that his remarks on Maron's podcast had been "flippant" and that, after the interview, Lauren told him, "You know this is a very sensitive subject field for people, but you're speaking similar you don't, and that's where yous seem stupid, and non who yous are." But he emphasized that, at root, he didn't say anything he didn't believe. Rogen told me: "That was in some ways the last taboo, for me every bit a Jewish comedian, saying that about Israel. It was the ane thing, virtually, I would never talk about, and probably part of this bad-instinct O.C.D. part of my brain that's, like, when someone says, 'Don't touch that 1 button,' function of me says, 'What would happen if I did?'"
Epitome
"Let me get my computer and show you something," Rogen said. He closed up the garage and we fabricated for a sunny 2nd-story deck bordering his office, where he rolled himself a fresh articulation — a proprietary Houseplant strain known every bit Diablo Wind, named after a weather blueprint that affects Northern California. "Information technology'south a pretty potent sativa," he explained. "A practiced piece of work-throughout-the-24-hour interval weed."
Rogen had come to accept that his and Evan'due south chance "to be the biggest names in movies has come and gone," he said. But rather than demoralizing him, this insight was freeing, and now he and Goldberg were plotting their return to filmmaking with a projection unlike anything they'd washed: "A big action movie," equally Rogen put it, called "Escape," that was heavily inspired by Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan.
"Escape" grew out of a claiming the duo set for themselves to endeavor and make people laugh without using dialogue. In "Pineapple Express," Rogen explained, "the scenes people remember are the fights, the foot through the windshield and, like, with 'Neighbors,' you think of the airbags" — moments, that is, of outsize physical comedy. "We were like, Why are those only the supporting things? Why are those, amid a body of water of talky jokes, these things that pop up in one case in a while? Why don't we make a bunch of these jokes and non rely on exact sense of humour?"
Youth is 'the time in people'southward lives that feels information technology could use the virtually organizing. It's the least-reconciled part of a lot of people'southward lives: "What do I exercise with that?" '
Rogen and Goldberg have flaunted virtuoso stoner ingenuity when it comes to crafting fix pieces — even the unfairly maligned "The Green Hornet," which they wrote and which Michel Gondry directed, is significantly redeemed by its daffily inspired activeness sequences alone, like the one in which a auto rides an elevator, or the one in which a character shoves some other grapheme into a foosball table and "kicks" him in the face repeatedly. With "Escape," Rogen said, "we did add together talking eventually, but for a while there was nearly none."
He opened his laptop, where the desktop epitome was the Wu-Tang logo rendered in rainbow colors so that it resembled the '80s-era Apple logo. Rogen clicked over to a folder marked ESCAPE, revealing hundreds of documents within. Every time he and Goldberg accept an idea for a motion-picture show, Rogen explained, they start compiling lists of "ideas for annihilation: characters, scenes, lines, plot twists, turns — it could exist equally general as, like, 'Someone locks themselves in the cupboard while trying to hide,' or information technology could exist like, 'OK, this character's been this way their whole life. … '"
Over time, whether they're in the same room or emailing dorsum and forth, as they've done during the pandemic, Rogen and Goldberg sculpt these lists into outlines, then sculpt those outlines into scripts: "Yous start to say, 'OK, these 10 things could get together,'" Rogen said. "Or, 'OK, that's a chunk of a movie,' or, 'If we want all these ideas in the same picture, what'south a graphic symbol that could back up that?'"
He scrolled through the folder. "These are our 'Escape' files — oh, Jesus — going dorsum to January 2016," he said. He glanced at an early list. "This totally changed," he said, opening some other. "These are gags," he explained. Rogen and Goldberg had collected dozens of Keaton-worthy ideas, which he asked me not to reveal. He scrolled to another document, dated February 2019 and titled "Boarded Action Beats" — "These are gags we started to actually depict," he said.
Working with an illustrator, Rogen and Goldberg had completed what was in essence a digital flip book diagraming every scene in "Escape." "We're literally storyboarding every second of the moving-picture show," Rogen said. One open up-ended, three-word gag I'd seen in a listing from May 2019 — centered delightfully on something you could purchase in a hardware shop — had been storyboarded into an elaborate action sequence. Rogen showed it to me frame past frame, narrating as he went. "She's trying to get from there to in that location … these guys are chasing her. … " His finger tapped the right arrow. "She grabs that guy, he's falling, bam, whoop!"
Even in flip-book form, the scene was funny. "Nosotros demand to know if these jokes are working, and if the timing is right," Rogen said, "and you can't do a table read and see if people express mirth or non, considering that would exist me saying, similar, 'He throws the thing, it bounces off the door, information technology hits him in the face.'" He laughed. "We demand to be able to see that!"
There's a story Mark Rogen tells nigh the early days of Seth's career: When the family showtime moved to 50.A., for 'Freaks and Geeks,' Seth signed with a managing director and a lawyer, and subsequently some time, "his lawyer threatened to fire him, because Seth kept getting offered unlike gigs and saying, 'I'm not doing that, that'southward not a pic I'd go see and it's not a movie I'd want my friends to come across me in.'"
Rogen'south self-assurance might be the most enviable affair about him: The fact that, with rare exceptions, he has only ever seemed to work on exactly what he wants to work on. Rogen one time recalled his friend Jonah Loma's approaching him for communication after being offered a function in a "Transformers" sequel. "I tin can come across if Steven Spielberg's calling you lot, asking you lot to do something, how that's hard to turn down," Rogen told an interviewer, recounting the exchange. But in this case, he told Loma: "You lot want to brand a moving picture about fightin' robots? Make your own moving-picture show about fightin' robots. You can do that. That's on the table now." This story has an repeat in "Yearbook," in a affiliate where Spielberg himself really invites Rogen and Goldberg to interact on a project inspired by the 1984 sci-fi movie "The Last Starfighter." The same idea had already occurred to them, and they decided they'd rather just make their own version. Rogen isn't overly concerned in the book with flattering the powerful. There's also a funny story about George Lucas — that, within moments of meeting Rogen and Goldberg in 2012, he expressed his finality that the world would end later that year (Lucas, through a representative, denied this account) — and an even funnier story nearly Nicolas Cage pretending to be a white Bahamian for a possible role in "The Green Hornet," bellowing improvised dialogue in a Caribbean patois.
'We were always trying to serve comedy, and dazzler doesn't always serve comedy.'
With Betoken Grey, Rogen tin exert that much more than control over his career. This has turned out to be adept for him not just creatively and financially, merely also as a way of weathering industry tumult. Rogen's stock in merchandise — the midbudget comedy — has long been on the endangered-species list in the Marvel era, during which time comedy talent has undergone a mass migration from movies to streaming television. And yet Rogen has largely bucked both of these trends: The Hollywood Reporter recently named Point Grayness "masters of the midbudget comedy," crediting its films' success with "keeping the genre alive."
Rogen told me, "In the last few years, we released 'Blockers' and 'Practiced Boys,' and they both did really well, and they're both 100 percentage the verbal affair people say doesn't work anymore: $xx-million comedies with no huge names that were simply funny R-rated comedies — and they both fabricated a very healthy multiple of their upkeep." Of "Good Boys," he noted, "That's a script that was effectually awhile, and no one wanted to get in, because it's well-nigh 12-yr-olds, and 12-year-olds can't meet information technology. And we say, Anybody's been 12! 'South Park' has been on for 20 years, and they're 9! I lookout movies about talking dogs — I'g not a canis familiaris!"
Setting aside the myopia of financial backers, Rogen went on: "I don't know if other filmmakers are having the chat that nosotros're always having, which is, Will this work in a cinema?" This wasn't, he went on, "a conversation you used to have to have, just now y'all do" — even more then, post-pandemic — "and we're very clear — nosotros desire this to exist in a theater, and then it has to do things that a movie that works in a theater does. Those movies are dissimilar. An audience paying to get out of the firm and be surrounded by hundreds of people? That'due south a very specific production, so you accept to be honest with yourself and say, 'Is this ticking the boxes for that product?' I expect at other movies and say, 'Did they call back this was gonna be in theaters? Did they think this was ticking those boxes?'"
He contrasted "Adept Boys" with another Betoken Gray release, "An American Pickle." With the onetime, Rogen said, "The concept was super-relatable and believable and like shooting fish in a barrel" — three 6th-grade friends ditch school and are waylaid past a series of misadventures en road to a party — "and it has ready pieces, and so information technology feels like information technology has a scope to it." Whereas, with "An American Pickle" — the first original feature film to stream on HBO Max, in which Rogen stars as both a Brooklynite spider web designer and his shtetl-hardened great-granddaddy, Herschel — "we had no illusions: This is not a movie people are gonna necessarily leave their houses for, a placidity character movie with three people in information technology."
None of which meant that Rogen was sanguine about the state of the manufacture. At i betoken, he told me that his plan was "hypothetically" to star in "Escape" "if it gets made one day." I expressed surprise at his uncertainty, since the film seemed well into preproduction. "I'm not convinced nosotros're making a picture until nosotros're two weeks into filming information technology," he said. "That used to be a thing, where you were told, 'You're greenlit.' That doesn't happen anymore."
On top of the obvious appeal for Rogen of starting a cannabis company, then, Houseplant has the added benefit of depending in no way on Hollywood for its beingness. The week after I visited him at home, I joined Rogen and Goldberg on a video phone call dedicated to Houseplant business.
"OK, what are we doing?" Rogen asked, sitting at his desk in Los Angeles.
"We're smoking weed!" Goldberg said in Vancouver.
This was not untrue, though the main reason for the call was to write copy that would accompany ii forthcoming products, something they like to exercise themselves: a leatherbound conveying example for loose joints and a "desk lamp with an ashtray built into information technology, kind of," Rogen said, property up a prototype so I could meet.
They agreed that, with the conveying instance, "at that place should be a joke of some nature," every bit Goldberg put it, just that it could "kickoff from a more utilitarian place, because it'south genuinely solving a trouble," Rogen added. But no one had been screaming for a combination lamp-ashtray, which meant it had far more than comedic potential.
"I idea nosotros could practise an 'And then in that location was light' joke. … " Goldberg said, kicking things off.
Rogen sidestepped this idea and offered some other: "There'southward also a simple one," he said, "like, 'For years I stared at my desk lamp and my ashtray, sitting beside each other — two stupidly separate things. … '" "Yes," Goldberg replied, building on the fleck. " 'I kept thinking of the pencil and the eraser, before they were brought together. … '"
"Exactly," Rogen said. "What are other disparate things that —"
Goldberg started riffing: " 'Pepperoni used to non fifty-fifty know pizza! A jukebox, combined with your phone? Cool!'"
Rogen started writing down these ideas in a shared certificate, as Goldberg experimented with wording to encapsulate them: " 'Not everything that should be together, is together. … '" Rogen laughed at this and said: "Yeah! 'Until someone has the audacity to combine them. … '"
Warming up now, Goldberg got sillier: " 'The concept of a chair and wheels combined to become the cycle, which revolutionized the way — '" Rogen croaky upward so loudly at this that I couldn't hear the rest.
" 'Buses and missiles combined to become airplanes. … '" Goldberg continued.
" 'Buses and birds '" Rogen suggested, smiling, and Goldberg's laughter indicated that this revision was a keeper.
For the next twenty minutes, I watched their shared document take course, their names hovering above their cursors, dancing manically around the screen, unfurling jokes. Presently the copy for both the lamp and the example was done, the sun was depression in the sky and the frogs at Rogen'southward place were croaking. Information technology was about 5 p.m., which is when he likes to caput to his pottery studio — to clock off for the day and go make some more things.
Prop stylist: Jason Jensen. Stylist: Avo Yermagyan. Groomer: Catherine Furniss. On-fix producer: Michael Kachuba/3Star Productions.
Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, Calif. He writes the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. Chris Buck is a photographer based in New York. His latest volume is "Gentlemen'southward Club: Partners of Exotic Dancers."
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