Rogen, Goldberg go comic, not funny

Famed Canadian comedy collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are going in a new direction these days.

While the duo behind Superbad and The Interview continue to churn out the raunchy fare their fans have come to love — like the upcoming animated film Sausage Party — they’re also producing more dramatic and serious projects.

In 2011, there was the cancer comedy 50/50; they co-directed the upcoming video game documentary Console Wars; and most recently they debuted their new AMC drama series Preacher, based on the 1990s comic book franchise the duo devoured as teens.

“The fact that the goal was not to be funny at all times was actually really freeing in a lot of ways and I think allowed us to try a lot of things that we probably would never have tried in something that was primarily a comedy,” Rogen says of the creative process behind Preacher, which marks their first foray into the TV world.

“I think it for sure let us move the camera in ways that we just never would in a comedy or just stylistically or tonally do things that in a movie about idiots who smoke weed you probably wouldn’t be able to do.”

Preacher stars Dominic Cooper as Jesse Custer, a criminal-turned-church-leader who finds himself inhabited by a mysterious entity that gives him an unusual power.

Goldberg and Rogen, who co-direct the series, say they’ve been fans of the comic by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon since it came out. “It was our favourite comic and not only did it match our sensibility but it helped form our sensibility, because we were reading it in high school at the exact same time when we started to do Superbad,” says Goldberg.