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By Stuart McGurk, GQ,
Through foggy highs that start a little after 7am, Seth Rogen's lockdown itinerary spanned a clutch of film projects, a hilarious, confessional new book, hours at the potter’s wheel (making ashtrays, naturally) and, ah, yes, the cultivation of his own budding business empire. And they said weed kills motivation...
For someone who smokes, by his own estimation, around eight or nine joints a day, Seth Rogen rises early and at almost exactly the same time each morning – between 7am and 7.15am. This is partly due to reading, a while ago, about the importance of sleep on brain health (something he is keen on) and partly because he no longer has to leave his house for meetings (something he is even more keen on).
Then: coffee, to get him up. Then: weed, to keep him there. He will flick the ash into one of the hundreds of ashtrays that he personally has made and another day in his serene lockdown will begin.
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Rogen lives in a Hollywood Hills West ranch house with his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, whom he first encountered when they worked on the final series of Da Ali G Show together in 2004. He was besotted the moment they met (her ringtone was the Jurassic Park theme) and was sure it was love some months later when he accidentally soiled his pants. Lauren had stayed over, he’d just got back from a bachelor party in Mexico and so had to work out the best way to kiss her goodbye without her noticing (butt out worked just fine). As she drove off he remembers thinking that he hoped he’d spend the rest of his life with this woman – mostly so that one day he could tell her this story, as he knew if anyone would appreciate it, it would be her. They’ve been married for almost a decade.
Sometimes they will do a morning workout together – a live Zoom with her trainer – but just as often he will take advantage of the many trails in their ten-acre grounds and will go off for a 45-minute hike, passing the natural waterfall that was one of the property’s key selling points, but which he was recently perturbed to recognise while browsing porn, as he watched four Russians having a “very uncircumcised orgy” in it. From this he took two things. One: if you live in a house in Los Angeles, chances are some porn has been shot there. And two: he’d finally done it – he’d watched all the porn on the internet. “It’s the only way to explain the statistical improbability.”
Freshly showered, he will put on a cosy Needles cardigan, hang out with his wife, play with his dog, roll his second joint of the day and start work at 10am.
Rogen founded Point Grey Pictures with childhood friend Evan Goldberg in 2011. Named after the Canadian high school they both attended – the experiences at which would provide the basis of Superbad, a film they started writing together at 13 – it has been behind nearly every Seth Rogen hit of the last decade, from 50/50 to the recent An American Pickle, via The Interview, This Is The End, Long Shot, The Disaster Artist and both Bad Neighbours films (he’ll admit, the second one was a mistake).
But for every project in which Rogen stars, there are countless others he produces. Some – such as Amazon’s superhero satire The Boys or Showtime’s dark finance comedy Black Monday – are about to start shooting new series. Others – such as the forthcoming CGI reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – don’t need shooting at all. And there are others still that are in pre-production, such as the big action comedy that doesn’t yet have a title or the recently announced Pam & Tommy, a Hulu miniseries about the whirlwind romance between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and the sex tape it produced (Lily James and Sebastian Stan will play the title roles; Rogen is playing the guy who stole the tape).
On any given day, Rogen will be dividing his time between anything up to eight of these projects, while also trying to carve out the time to write. “That,” he says, “is what I’m always looking for.” But if all that sounds stressful, don’t worry: Rogen has a system in place to ensure it’s not.
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Each night, someone at Point Grey will email him a detailed schedule, laying out hour by hour what he should be doing the next day. It is, he says, the only way he can navigate doing so many things. And so, “I just look at the schedule and I do what the schedule tells me.”
Granted, he will sometimes also take the time to tweet and often wonders if it’s worth it. He’s curious as to what history will say about Twitter. He wonders how closely it reflects the real world. He frets that critiquing politicians on Twitter doesn’t actually move the dial. Maybe there’s no such thing as bad press? He admits he doesn’t have the answers to these questions, but he is sure of one thing: “What’s nice about Twitter is that I can actually tell Ted Cruz to go fuck himself.” He doesn’t need to track down an email address and that, he points out, is actually time saved.
And, yes, sometimes, if needed, he will work outside of the schedule’s parameters. Just last night, he says, he and Goldberg were on the phone from 8pm to 10pm as they got a bunch of notes on a script they’re working on and realised it was going to provide more work than expected over the next two weeks.
But even then, as he sits in his armchair, cosy in his cardigan, talking comedy with his best friend, rolling his eight or ninth joint of the day, laughing that laugh that resembles someone trying to start a mower, it would be hard to imagine how anyone else could be having a more perfect pandemic.
As he pointed out on an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, he was made for this. His time had come. “I have kind of been self-isolating since 2009.”
Here’s something else Seth Rogen has found the time for: he’s written a book. It’s called Yearbook and is technically a memoir, though not really.
‘WHAT’S NICE ABOUT TWITTER IS THAT I CAN ACTUALLY TELL TED CRUZ TO GO F*** HIMSELF’
If you’re looking for insights into how, aged just 16, he managed to not only land a starring role in the short-lived but much-admired Judd Apatow comedy Freaks And Geeks, but then also became one of the writers on Apatow’s similarly short-lived follow-up, Undeclared, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re interested in the story behind Superbad, the high-school comedy that put him on the Hollywood map, or how Knocked Up made him a new kind of slacker-star, it’s not for you. If you are, at any point, expecting the sentence “That was when I hit rock bottom – and I knew I needed help”, don’t add to basket.
It is, instead, a string of the kind of stories he might tell on a chat show, the kind of stories he might get thrown off a chat show for telling and the kind of stories that would otherwise only be told over at Rogen’s after the bongs come out. They’re arranged in roughly chronological order, they’re often spit-take funny, but it’s fair to say that any book that contains the sentence “I know what you’re thinking... Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t have a vagina” is not a memoir in the Long Walk To Freedom sense.
This, says Rogen, was by design. “Honestly,” he says, “in many ways, that was the biggest thing to overcome in my head: to demystify what a book was and what it meant to people. And I wanted to frame it as entertainment and not, like, a deep look at how Seth Rogen came to be.”
Instead, he essentially saw the book as a first-person comedy delivery system: “It would take me 20 years to make enough movies to include all these ideas.”
And so we go from stories about his grandparents from when he was a child (“They were really my first significant comedic inspiration, my muse. Or, more accurately, my Jews”) all the way to the fallout from The Interview, the broad 2014 Kim Jong-un satire that caused an international incident (more on which later) and ends with the Lord Of The Flies-esque tale in which Rogen and his entire teenage Jewish summer camp almost died in the woods.
In between – and I can’t stress this enough – it contains all the experiences you would exactly expect Seth Rogen to have had.
There’s the first girlfriend, who dumped him after three days but did become the inspiration for Emma Stone’s character in Superbad. There’s the time, at 14, when in order to obtain more drugs, he dabbled in selling them, only to get jacked by the older kids doing the buying. (Rogen had bought nunchucks for protection. He did not use the nunchucks.) There’s the ruse in which he would fake a seizure in 7-Eleven in order for the other kids to fill their pockets with everything in sight while he convulsed on the floor. (“That got me banned for a week, which, in retrospect, was a pretty light punishment.”) Or the time, later, when everyone on his flight was convinced he was having a seizure, only for Rogen to put it down to the recent consumption of a hash brownie, an “Angry Whopper” from Burger King and the fact that turbulence had caused his open mouth to spray his fellow passengers like a sprinkler as he slept. (Rogen: “I think I feel OK.” Doctor: “This amount of sweat is not OK!”)
There are tales of helping to push a cop car while on coke, of getting so high on mushrooms that he ended up in Paris, of finding himself onstage in an Amsterdam sex show, where he stripped off only to have the audience laugh at the money belt riding up his stomach, the conclusion of which saw a woman write “The End” on his torso in perfect penmanship using nothing but her vagina. (“This shit blew that My Left Foot shit out of the water.”)
‘I DEFY [SCIENTOLOGY] TO POINT OUT WHERE I’VE MISWRITTEN’
It contains a scene, dear reader, in which Rogen attends the porn awards and sees the winner of “Best Anal Orgy” take to the stage, before wistfully musing that the winner “worked harder for that statue than Meryl Streep ever has. Sure, she learned to talk like Julia Child, but can she stick nine dicks in her ass while keeping good light for the cameraman? This is not a rhetorical question. Can she?”
But actually, by far the juiciest tales are ones Rogen relays from his time traversing his fellow celebrities in Hollywood. In fact, these are so juicy, I tell him, that I want to play a game, and that game is How Likely Will This Person Be Offended That You’ve Told This Story?
“[Laughs.] I probably should have done this before I wrote them down! This will be helpful to me as well...”
OK, first up: the story in which, in early 2012, Rogen and Goldberg went for a meeting with Steven Spielberg, only to have a glum George Lucas also show up and proceed to inform them of his sincere belief the world was about to end – or, at the very least, that everything west of the San Andreas Fault would soon sink into the ocean. (Goldberg: “You really think that’s gonna happen?” Lucas: “I know it’s gonna happen.” Rogen: “How?” Lucas: “It’s science. And I know science.”)
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“Well, he’s since said that it didn’t happen, so my assumption is he will not be happy! And he’s said he was joking, but he was not joking.”
OK, number two: the story in which they spoke to Nicolas Cage about him possibly playing the Russian crime boss villain in The Green Hornet, only for Cage to inform them he wanted to play him as a bald man, with hair tattooed on, large prosthetic lips and a voice like Edward G Robinson. They later met Cage in person and he informed them that, actually, he wanted to play him as a “white Bahamian”, with a thick Caribbean accent, and proceeded to act out a scene in which he would be dumping pigs’ blood on Rogen’s Green Hornet in a “creepy voodoo ritual”. He didn’t get the part but did request a meeting more recently during which Cage asked Rogen if he’d told James Franco about his idea, as he suspected Franco had nicked the character for Spring Breakers.
“The second part actually just happened before the pandemic,” says Rogen. “I mean, he already doesn’t like me, is the point. So he’ll continue not to like me!”
Number three: Scientology in general, specifically the part where Rogen describes it as a “religion/cult/pyramid scheme invented by coke-addled/moron/science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard”. Though, on reflection, I add, it would probably all get past the fact-check.
“[Laughs.] Right! I defy them to point out where I’ve miswritten.”
Perhaps the best story isn’t one by which he’s likely to offend the person in question, but one that feels so outlandish I feel the need to check Rogen hasn’t embellished it in some way.
When making apocalypse comedy This Is The End, Rogen asked Snoop Dogg if he would write a song for it. Snoop agreed, turned up to the studio, wrote the hook, before Rogen asked him if he could rap a verse for it too – something Snoop hadn’t planned on. As Rogen puts it, “He put his head down and thought for a long moment. Then he looked over to one of his guys, narrowed his gaze and said, ‘Bring in the hoes.’” Upon which, a gaggle of six hitherto unseen women entered, each “very much dressed like strippers”, who all proceeded to dance around Snoop for 20 minutes while he wrote a verse on his BlackBerry.
‘THE STIGMA IS BECAUSE WEED AFFECTS YOUR BRAIN. PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TALKING ABOUT BRAIN HEALTH’
As Rogen points out, this posed several logistical questions. Where had they been up until that point? Were they there solely for the purpose of being Snoop’s writing muses? And, most confounding, given Snoop was until that point unaware any verse composition would be required, were they hanging around just in case?
“It is zero per cent embellished,” Rogen tells me now. “They just came in! I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know where they were. They just came in, they did their thing and then they got out.”
I say I almost feel sorry for Snoop Dogg. It must be quite debilitating, only being able to write under such specific conditions. What if you wanted to write all day? They’d have to dance in shifts.
“I know. So much planning would have to go into even the least bit of creative output! You’d need call sheets, you’d need transportation figured out, you’d need lunches for people... you’d need refreshments and, during Covid, the testing every day! [Laughs.]”
As we’re on the subject of This Is The End, I mention a story I’d heard a rumour about but that he hasn’t included in the book, specifically that Emma Watson, who appears, like most people in the film, as a version of herself, stormed off the set after refusing to shoot one of the movie’s more out-there scenes, one that sees Danny McBride as a cannibal and Channing Tatum as his leather-thonged gimp on a leash.
What happened? Had she not read the script properly? “I mean, I don’t look back on that and think, ‘How dare she do that?’ You know? I think sometimes when you read something, when it comes to life it doesn’t seem to be what you thought it was. But it was not some terrible ending to our relationship. She came back the next day to say goodbye. She helped promote the film. No hard feelings and I couldn’t be happier with how the film turned out in the end.” Besides, he says, “She was probably right. It was probably funnier the way we ended up doing it.”
Finally, I ask about the one person in the book whom Rogen very much does mean to offend – Michael Lynton, the head of Sony at the time of The Interview fiasco and whom he describes as Beelzebub. Specifically: “He was a dude in his early sixties, relatively fit, red skin, large horns, a tail, hooves and a legion of screaming demons flanking him at all times.”
“Yeah,” says Rogen, “I assume he won’t like that. Or maybe he will look down from his bony throne to the screaming minions below him and he will think, ‘You know, it’s probably a pretty fair description.’”
Rogen is not a fan. The book details, broadly, what we mostly knew about the affair. Rogen and Goldberg, intrigued by the idea that TV reporters sometimes get to interview some of the worst people on the planet, wrote a script that saw a clueless TV personality bag an interview with a Kim Jong-un-type dictator and subsequently agrees to assassinate him for the CIA, sensing an opportunity for even greater adulation than the interview itself. The twist: they imagined this vain TV personality would end up enraptured by the dictator, who would, in turn, manipulate him for his own benefit. (The irony of Trump, a vain TV personality-turned-president, later being manipulated by Kim during their own encounter is not lost on Rogen.)
‘IT MAKES YOU VERY PRESENT. IT’S HARD TO DWELL ON THINGS WHEN YOU’RE DOING POTTERY’
Sony greenlit it instantly, with only two conditions: one, Franco had to play the TV personality (easy); and two, they should make it about the actual Kim Jong-un (sure). This is where the problems began.
Rogen recalls being summoned to a meeting with Lynton and Sony’s risk-assessment expert after North Korea issued a statement promising “merciless” retaliation against the United States if the movie was released, calling the film itself an “act of terror”.
The security expert told Rogen what he already knew: North Korea was not happy.
Rogen replied, “Will they be even more unhappy when they actually see the movie?”
“From what we can tell,” said the expert, “they likely already hacked into Sony’s servers and watched the film, which is why they issued such a strong response.”
Various changes were then requested by Sony – not least taking the word “Sony” off the movie entirely – but the key sticking point was Kim Jong-un’s death in the movie’s climax, to which Sony requested various changes to minimise the impact.
“Can you not kill him?” asked Lynton at one point.
As Rogen furiously put it to Lynton, in one of a cache of leaked Sony emails from the subsequent North Korean hack that would make headlines around the world, this wasn’t just about a gross-out ending to a comedy (Kim’s head, it should be pointed out, exploded), “This is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy. That is a very damning story and a very different one.”
Of course, none of the changes mattered: the hack happened and Sony pulled the movie just before release, later slipping it out on video-on-demand and DVD.
Five years on, how does Rogen look back on it all?
“Well, mainly that a lot of comedians have the sense they are embroiled in some sort of, quote-unquote, controversy, but none of that was controversial. They’ve experienced hypothetical controversy of people getting mad at them on Twitter. The president didn’t hold a press conference about their controversy. There weren’t books and documentaries and classes in universities dedicated to the fallout.”
Does he think, looking back, that the bosses at Sony feel they made a mistake in pulling the film?
“I know that Michael Lynton thinks they made a mistake,” he says. “Does [then studio head] Amy Pascal regret it? I don’t know.”
‘[SNOOP] LOOKED OVER TO HIS GUYS AND SAID, “BRING IN THE HOES.” I DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY CAME FROM!’
But if anything, he says, it was liberating. He realised that, as bad as it was in the bull’s-eye, you can always come out the other side.
“I’m still allowed to work. People still pay me to make my films. People still finance them.”
And he’s sure of one thing: if Trump had been president at the time, it would have been a whole different story.
“We would have been fucking sent to North Korea! Men would have shown up, thrown me in a van, thrown me in the back of a fucking cargo plane and I would have been, like, parachuted over Pyongyang to be executed. I can’t even imagine.”
Still, if he had developed any inflated sense of self-importance, it was soon punctured when he went to shoot Steve Jobs a few months later and Kate Winslet asked him, “What was with that whole North Korea mess, dear? Did anything ever come of that?”
More and more, lately, Seth Rogen has been pondering how he produces nothing of any weight or mass. This isn’t self-criticism – he means it literally. Films, he thinks, are a weird product that way. Because after everything – after the script and the budget and the acting and editing and the press and the premiere – what are you left with, really? That’s what he wants to know.
“You can’t touch or feel them,” he says. “They occupy no space. They’re now just ones and zeroes... You know what I mean?”
He wanted to become a creator of things. Things you can touch, feel and, more specifically, smoke.
Rogen and Goldberg launched Houseplant in March 2019 in Canada and expanded to the US last month following a relaxing of cannabis regulations, upon which the website crashed almost immediately due to the demand.
It is, it’s fair to say, a labour of love for the pair. They did extensive – some would say exhaustive – testing of hundreds of strains before eventually deciding upon the three they would sell: Houseplant Indica, Houseplant Sativa and Houseplant Hybrid.
Partly, this is simply the culmination of a life-long dream of Rogen’s to be an international drug dealer. But also, to hear him tell it, because he’s passionate about the paraphernalia too and feels that aesthetics have been hitherto overlooked in the getting-baked business. Again: things you can touch.
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“As someone who smokes weed all day, every day,” he says, “I think I was really longing for objects that were made for me.” Unwittingly, he’d been researching this his entire life. Why weren’t people making a lighter the size and heft, for instance, of a brick, which even the most committed stoner could never mislay? “You want a lighter that’s a fixture,” says Rogen. Houseplant made the “impossible-to-lose” block table lighter, which could also kill a man. Why couldn’t the packaging be beautiful? They put their weed in pastel tea caddy-like canisters. Why had no one even considered selling vinyl LPs with a mix of songs geared to each strain?
“It was one of those things where the deeper you go, the more you realise that no one has dug that well before.”
But mostly, you suspect, the main motivation was simply that Seth Rogen feels pretty great feeling like Seth Rogen and feels that everyone should have a go.
‘[TRUMP] WOULD HAVE SENT [US] TO NORTH KOREA. I’D HAVE BEEN PARACHUTED OVER PYONGYANG TO BE EXECUTED’
To say Rogen loves weed is not entirely accurate, as, to hear him tell it, that would be like saying you are passionate about gravity. Granted, you would likely find a way to exist without it, but it would be pretty awkward.
“People don’t stigmatise shoes,” he says. “People don’t say they make walking any less ‘real’. We need them for the ground we walk on! I wear glasses. We need gloves. We need houses. We’ve done a millions things to compensate for the fact that we just do not thrive in this place, you know?”
In the book he writes, “I’m not quite cut out for this world, but weed makes it OK.”
What would it be like for him, I wonder, to go without?
“It would be like saying you can’t wear clothes any more. It would be a real bummer! It would make it really hard for me to do what I need to do in the world.”
It also helps, he says, with his low-level Tourette’s and OCD, both of which are more pronounced in his father. And it’s here, he feels, that the real stigma behind weed lies. “The only stigma with weed is because it affects your brain. And people are just weird about it. They don’t like talking about brain health.”
His father, he writes in the book, wears the same type of socks – white Champions – every day, but was perturbed to realise, over the years, the variations in wear and tear and so started writing numbers on them, in order to have the same grade of sock consistency on both feet at any given time. Rogen admits the laundry took longer, as he’d often find his father standing over the washing machine bellowing, “Have you seen a seven or a nine?”
His father was even featured on a Canadian documentary called Chore Wars, upon which people started recognising him in the street: “Holy shit! You’re the sock guy!”
“He’s also very specific about his food,” Rogen tells me. “You have to leave him alone. We’ll all be eating at the table and he’ll be standing in the other room eating alone. He eats in a weird way and so just doesn’t want anyone pointing it out or judging him.”
Rogen doesn’t suffer from anything so severe, but says, “It was much worse when I was younger; I was very twitchy. I think I’m just better at controlling it. But I will find myself doing little things like flaring my nostrils, you know?” The weed, naturally, helps, “as it does with everything”.
His father also developed a habit of refusing to throw out paper towels, instead letting them dry before using them again, and it’s something Rogen, too, has found himself doing. “I’m like, ‘What a lunatic,’ but then I’ll find myself thinking, ‘I’ve only wiped water with this. I can probably just put it out and it’ll be dry again.’ [Laughs.]”
When Rogen’s mother read an early draft of his book, the main thing she said to him was “Why do you talk about drugs so much?” This prompts two thoughts. One: had she met her son before this day? But two: she’s correct, as there are, in fairness, 71 mentions of the word “weed” alone, which doesn’t even allow for the myriad synonyms or other types of drugs. In the time we talk over Zoom, Rogen will generally either be smoking weed or rolling a joint in order to smoke weed.
ROGEN: ‘I THINK I FEEL OK.’ DOCTOR: ‘THIS AMOUNT OF SWEAT IS NOT OK!’
Rogen gave genuine thought to the question, though, and realised that “Once I analysed it consciously, I was trying to combat the stigma surrounding drugs, versus the stigma surrounding things like alcohol”.
One of the more surprising moments in the book comes when Rogen attends the premiere for The Interview in LA and notes that halfway through the film he dropped “two large capsules filled with MDMA crystals”. By the time the movie was ending, he notes, “They were kicking in hard.”
Between the ages of 13 and 23, Rogen drank “as often as I could without derailing my life in any meaningful way”, but started wondering more and more why he was doing it.
“Like, why am I getting blackout drunk at these things and hating myself the next day? And I think I realised I had been lied to about alcohol and that it held a place in society for the wrong reasons.”
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Drugs didn’t make him feel like that the next day. And so, bar the odd glass of wine at a restaurant, Rogen cut out alcohol and, around ten years ago now, started taking drugs socially instead. After all, what was the difference?
“Once I grew more comfortable with doing other drugs that were more stigmatised and not worrying about damage in terms of anyone’s perceptions of me, there was just a point where I realised I just need to be comfortable doing a quarter tab of molly [MDMA] at this party and not drinking and having a much better time. Or eating a tiny bit of shrooms at this thing or having a [weed] lollipop. The next day I don’t have a hangover. I’m not throwing up. It’s just much better for me... Truly, you would be better off doing a hit of acid than drinking.”
I have to ask: does he often do MDMA at his movie premieres then?
“Yes! I’ve done it in the past, for sure. I mean, I don’t do it during press for the first part of the premiere...”
Rogen doesn’t meditate or anything so Headspace-y (“Though I do,” he points out, “find myself staring into space a lot”), but he has recently found a passion for pottery that does the same trick, ever since he and his wife joined a studio a little over two years ago. They’ve since built a studio in their garage with three pottery wheels – one for each of them and one for a guest, a literal third wheel. His creations – mostly, in fairness, custom ashtrays – have become an Instagram sensation.
Again, it’s something tangible. “I just found it incredibly gratifying to create things that you could touch and interact with.”
He’s given countless numbers of them away as gifts, while a closet contains “hundreds of things that just suck that I don’t want to give as gifts, but I don’t want to throw away either”.
Just before lockdown, as everyone was panic-buying toilet rolls, the potters of this world, says Rogen, were doing the same with clay.
“There was [a shortage] at first – but we made an illegal back-door clay purchase. [Laughs.]”
During the week he takes delight in tending to the various steps required for things he has already “thrown” (ie, made) – some trimming here, some glazing there – but at the weekends he and his wife will throw “for hours and hours and hours and hours”, sometimes six or seven hours straight, as he smokes weed all the way and his perfect pandemic continues.
‘I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING I WANT TO DO OTHER THAN SITTING ON A COUCH WITH LAUREN EATING CHEESEBURGERS’
“It makes you very present and focused on whatever it is you’re doing at any given moment,” he says. “It’s hard to dwell on other things when you’re doing pottery.”
At the end of each week in the Seth Rogen household it’s time for the Point Grey film club. While the rest of the time Rogen and his wife have been rewatching the American Office or watching the Harry Potter films (“We’d never seen them”) or The Larry Sanders Show (“My wife had never seen it”), the highlight of each week comes on Friday afternoon, when they will discuss, over Zoom, the film that one of Point Grey’s 14 employees had selected as the film to watch that week. It started with a simple discussion but has blossomed into something else entirely, ever since Goldberg selected Starship Troopers, a film he’s obsessed with, and managed to convince the movie’s storyboard artist to join the Zoom discussion too, to answer their questions.
It began when the pandemic did and has seen the likes of James L Brooks talk about his film Terms Of Endearment, Nancy Meyers fielding questions about The Holiday, Amy Heckerling discuss Clueless, Charlize Theron logging on to chat about Monster and even Keanu Reeves arriving virtually to tell them all they wanted to know about The Matrix.
“Honestly,” says Rogen, “it’s the best part of my week.”
Later this month Rogen will have his second birthday of the pandemic, which will see him turn 39. For the first, various friends drove by outside in their cars to honk their horns briefly and give their regards. For Rogen, though, it was as close to a perfect birthday as he could imagine. “I’m OK with that,” he says. “Like, so much better than being on a film set and have everyone awkwardly sing happy birthday.” He didn’t even have to put out his joint.
For the next one, he says, he’s not even bothered about the cars. He and Lauren will probably just order some junk food and watch a movie or some TV.
“That’s all I want to do. I don’t have anything else I want to be doing other than sitting on a couch with Lauren eating cheeseburgers.”
When I later spoke to Goldberg, asking if this can be true, if Rogen can really be so serenely content, and suggest there must be another side, he told me, no, really, there isn’t.
“He just wants to be on the couch, with his wife and his dog and his weed, watching reality television. I guess it’s a weird thing for a famous person. But that’s his ultimate goal in life. It’s the boring answer. But it’s true.”
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