Rogenomics

He’s still getting high. He’s still making us laugh. But he’s kinda running Hollywood now, too

SETH ROGEN IS NOT THE TYPE OF DUDE TO DISTILL HIS STRATEGIES FOR LIVING INTO THERAPEUTIC SOUND BITES, little chunks of wisdom inspo to be digested in the morning alongside a matcha and some sun salutations. In fact, and thank god, he wouldn’t even formally consider them “strategies for living” at all, let alone dream of imposing them on anyone else. Still, spend a little time in his company, talking about his life, and certain patterns start to emerge, themes and lessons recurring with enough frequency that they can be isolated for general distribution: work harder than everyone else. Find a mentor, or at least some encouragement. Cultivate enduring relationships. Grow gradually. Beware hubris. Never be their biggest problem. Be in control of your own work (where possible). Always have something else going on.

On a Tuesday a ernoon in April, Seth Rogen was sitting in a corner booth in the back of Canter’s Deli in LA, awaiting his matzo-ball soup. Over the years he’s celebrated birthdays here and, in the era before he had o ces, the restaurant functioned as a de facto conference room for business meetings. No surprise, then, that he was greeted like the mayor, along with obscure inside jokes with the waitsta . Almost immediately, Rogen – bearded, bespectacled, becapped – was approached by some blokes apologetically asking for a picture. He obliged, grabbing their phones and mugging for twosecond intervals. ‘Taking the picture myself was a big evolution,’ he said a er they’d gone. ‘ at helps. Takes a lot of the guesswork out.’

For people whose casual impression of him begins and ends with the gallery of quasi-employed, stoned men-children he played in his 20s, it might be hard to fully comprehend that Rogen, now 37, is a legitimate Hollywood operator and entrepreneur in his own right, with a career that extends well beyond acting and writing. Over a single week, for example, he announced a multi-platform deal between Point Grey Pictures – his production company with creative partner Evan Goldberg – and Lionsgate, and launched a weed brand emphasising consumer education, Houseplant, in his native Canada. In addition to developing, writing and acting in his own lm projects, Rogen produces TV (Preacher, Future Man, Black Monday), does voice work (Sausage Party, Lion King), and with his wife, Lauren Miller-rogen, created Hilarity for

Charity, a series of comedy shows that’s raised millions for Alzheimer’s care, support and research. He’s also writing a book of essays, due out in 2020. at lingering lowachieving persona of his old characters, though, might be a blessing, since it’s provided a cover against public scrutiny and raised expectations for Rogen, the human, who arrived in Hollywood as a teenager and hasn’t stopped working since. e man, like the myth, may be a burner, but he’s also a machine.

‘I really always worked hard, because I recognised from a pretty young age it was one of the only things I could control,’ Rogen says. ‘I remember I did karate as a kid, and when I started I was the worst in the class – I was the worst of 25 kids who were afraid of getting picked on. And then just because everyone else quit, three years later I was at the top of the class, and there were 25 kids who were worse than me. And that was always tangible. Just by not stopping I became the best one. It wasn’t this ferocious leap. I just kept going, and slowly [other] people stopped. Because a lot of people will stop.’

Rogen was just back from Cinemacon in Las

Vegas, where he’d been deployed to charm a group of international theatre owners on behalf of his new movie, the romantic comedy Long Shot. It was a randomseeming but necessary act of ring kissing and part of the pre-release promotional kabuki that can help nudge a project toward success. ( ese are the gatekeepers who decide whether or not to screen the lms, a er all.) Since premiering at SXSW in March, where

it won an audience award, Long Shot has been boosted by enthusiastic word of mouth on the strength of

Rogen’s chemistry with his co-star, Charlize eron.

e lm, in which eron plays the secretary of state and presidential hopeful, as well as Rogen’s former babysitter and love interest, is both a return to form for Rogen and an evolution of the type he’s probably still best known for: the fuzzy slackers of Knocked Up, Pineapple Express and The 40-Year-old Virgin. As in many of those lms, Rogen is romantically paired with a cool blonde and ingests his share of recreational drugs.

is time, though, his character, whom Rogen described as ‘an almost good-case scenario of other people

I’ve played,’ has at least the pretense of both a real job and a legitimate ethical core. Progress!

as both producer and star, Rogen was deeply invested in the project, having shepherded it through years of development, and though he’s too seasoned to ever assume that success is a foregone conclusion, he was pleased with the lm and cautiously optimistic about its prospects. ‘When I like it and I’m proud of it, I’m de nitely more relaxed,’ he said. ‘It’s awkward to promote a movie that you yourself would not be that excited to go see.’ Like what? ‘I remember You, Me and Dupree was the rst time I had to do that, and that movie’s ne, I just didn’t love it. It honestly was not a movie I would have gone out to go see. It’s OK, the Russo brothers [Joe and Anthony] did ne,’ he added, laughing. ‘I actually remember standing in my closet in my apartment, doing a radio interview, being like, “Yeah, go see it, it’s great,” and being like, “Ugh.” Never again do I want to have to tell people to go see a movie that I myself actually wouldn’t see. It’s hard enough to promote a movie. When you’re also morally corrupting yourself, it’s a real bummer.’

Early on in his career, ush with youth and the success of some lms he was plenty proud of, Rogen and Goldberg were o ered what seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime: to write – and for Rogen, star in – a lm adaptation of The Green Hornet. ‘At rst we were like, “Great!”’ Rogen recalled. Till then, the pair had enjoyed a large degree of creative input over the lm projects they’d written together, the comedies Superbad and Pineapple Express, which had both proved to be whopping hits and recouped their budgets many times over. ‘ ey were cheap-enough movies that the studios always had bigger sh to fry,’ explained Rogen. But going from relatively inexpensive comedies to a $120 million (R1.6 billion) Vfx-laden action

lm was a sudden, vertiginous climb. ‘What I didn’t appreciate was that

now we were the bigger

sh and we would get all the attention that was being absorbed by other movies on our earlier movies. I remember telling people, “ey don’t fuck with us, it’s great,” and then we were sitting in a meeting where [the executives] were like, “All right, notes. Page one,” and I was like, “Page one! What the fuck?

I’ve written two movies for you guys over the last few years, I thought we were cool. What are we doing here?”’

From that point,

The Green Hornet was besieged by troubles – director replacements, tensions on the set – and when it was released, in 2011, it was critically savaged. But, Rogen pointed out, ‘on the grand scale of superhero movies, it isn’t even on the low end of the spectrum of how these movies are received. It’s viewed as this catastrophic disaster, but on the grand scale of catastrophic disasters, it’s not that bad a catastrophic disaster.’

Since then, Rogen and Goldberg have rarely strayed from their triedand-true formula:

‘$20-$35 million (R279-R489 million) is where you’re never going to be their biggest problem. at’s literally what it is,’ said Rogen. ‘As long as they’re making some $150 million

(R2 billion) movie that’s a fucking disaster, they’re not paying attention to us. We’re the smartest business decision they made that week, because they just don’t have to worry about us. A lot of our career is just based on not being their biggest headache. Every once in a while, I meet someone, or one of my friends,

[who] is their biggest headache, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, thanks to you, we can do whatever the fuck we want.”’

For Rogen, recovery from professional knocks has always come in the form of more work, di erent work, and that was true post-hornet as well, so that in the end what might have capsized other careers barely rocked his: ‘It was a bummer, and I always hate being the centre of thousands of articles telling you how shitty you are – that’s not fun. But if you can get through that, which I have, many times, then you can just keep working. Again, that’s the thing: you just keep working. With the hope that in general I will produce more good work than bad work, and that will hopefully carry me onwards.’

rogen was raised on the east side of Vancouver, the younger of two children (his sister, a social worker, is three years older) in a family of liberal values in a progressive city.

e Rogens are a family of distinct personalities. His parents both worked for government agencies, his mother as a social worker who specialised in teaching parenting skills, and his father for the Coalition of People with Disabilities. Sandy, Rogen’s mom, has a popular Twitter account (@Rogensandy) that indicates a strong comedic voice of her own. ese days, she teaches kundalini yoga. ‘We did it in my living room once, but I mean, if there’s one thing that’s not relaxing, it’s the sound of your own mother’s voice,’ said her son.

Of the two, though, Rogen said his dad, Mark, is the more indelibly eccentric: ‘My dad has fully undiagnosed OCD, I would imagine. A

‘A LOT OF OUR CAREER IS JUST BASED ON NOT BEING THEIR STUDIO EXECS BIGGEST HEADACHES. EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, I MEET SOMEONE WHO IS THEIR BIGGEST HEADACHE, AND IT’S LIKE, “THANKS TO YOU, WE CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK WE WANT”’

good example of how weird he is, is that when I was a kid, he had all these white Champion socks – which is funny, because it’s the same thing I wear now – and he didn’t like that they would get washed at di erent frequencies and would have di erent thicknesses when they were paired. So he numbered each of his pairs of socks so that he knew each pair had always been washed the same frequency and he would never be stuck with a sock that had been worn down more than its mate. It’s a very speci c personality.’

As he gets older, Rogen notices he has more in common with his creators than he previously imagined. Lately, he’s recognised his father’s cadences in his own voice, and he’s become increasingly sympathetic to his dad’s other weirdnesses, such as his habit of wearing a purse. ‘What’s funny is it makes his mother really uncomfortable,’ Rogen said. ‘My grandmother hates when my dad wears a purse. And around her he still wears a purse but in more muted colours. He’ll wear pretty bright purses, generally speaking. He buys his own. But then, recently, I found myself talking to my wife, like, “Man, I have too much shit in my pockets, I wish there was a thing I had where

I was able to keep this shit.’ And she’s like, “You mean like a purse?”’ He sighed. ‘ is is how it happens.’

idiosyncrasies aside, his parents were always big boosters of Rogen’s creative pursuits, even suggesting he sign up for the stand-up-comedy workshop that set his career trajectory in motion. ‘I was the only kid, but it was a non-threatening way to try it,’ he remembered. ‘You got up in front of the class, you said your jokes, it went pretty well, so it was encouraging.’

You can watch his old routine on Youtube, and as he slow-rolls through jokes about Jewish summer camp, Jewish grandparents, and bullies, it’s the fact of his con dence that dazzles the brain. ‘I thought I could do it,’ he said with a shrug.

Kind words from the older comics on the scene cemented that instinct, and he stuck with it. ‘Especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learnt that stand-up comedy can be a very tough world to grow alliances in and nd support in. If I met a 14-year-old kid who was trying to do what I was doing, my rst instinct would probably be pretty dismissive,’ he admitted. ‘I’m very appreciative that people were nice to me, because without that I probably would have just stopped.’ Instead, he began doing sets around town, getting easy in front of an audience and perfecting his timing. By the time the casting apparatus for Freaks and Geeks rolled into town, a few years later, Rogen was prepared. ‘I remember they laughed hard,’ he said of the audition. ‘I remember walking out and being like, “If I didn’t get that, fuck those people.”’

Overnight, Rogen went from being a high-school kid who cut class to smoke weed to

working 14-hour days on a set surrounded by adults.

at, he said, even more than geography, accounted for the culture shock. His parents, who were both out of work at the time, joined him in LA, so in addition to suddenly having a serious job, 17-year-old Rogen became, for a time, the family breadwinner: ‘I was a low-paid actor on a network TV show, but I remember my dad being like, “In this year you’ll make more money than I made my entire life.”’

at sounds like an insane amount of pressure for a kid, and I said as much, but Rogen explained that he experienced the period as a relief. His parents were socialists who worked for the government. Financial security had never been prioritised or guaranteed. ‘I was happy to have enough money,’ Rogen said, ‘that everyone could have money.’

With Freaks and

Geeks, Rogen established a relationship with Judd Apatow, the crucial patron of his early career, who’d brought him onto the show and later hired him as both a writer and actor on the comedy Undeclared.

eir association would bring them mutual glory and enrichment in the end, but rst there were disappointments to endure. A er both shows were cancelled a er one season, Rogen was pissed o and depressed. e whiplash of success and then failure had been a succinct introduction to Hollywood, and he was suddenly stuck in a loop of auditioning and not getting parts. To make matters worse, ‘my friends who were better actors were getting cast in things,’ he said. ‘ at was making me angry as well. I knew deep down they deserved it more, so that was annoying.’

But when Goldberg nished university and joined him in LA, the two directed their energies toward nishing the script for Superbad and writing Pineapple Express. To keep them a oat nancially, Apatow tossed them occasional rewriting jobs, and in 2004, they were hired as writers on Da Ali G Show, e ectively ending the fallow period for good. Over the next few years, Rogen and Apatow worked together on, among other

lms, The 40-Year-old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad – making Rogen a star.

he’s aware that some of the work from that period hasn’t aged well. ‘Evan recently was like, “By the time my kids are grown, all of our work will be deemed unwatchable. I have no doubt about it. I think entire parts of culture will just be deemed regressive and no one will watch it anymore, and there’s a good chance our movies will t into that category.”’ But they’ve tried to evolve with the times, and Rogen said riding the comedic line between enlightened and neutered in the Age of Woke isn’t as tricky as you might think. ‘I think if you actually care, then it’s easy. We don’t want people to feel bad when they’re watching our movies. I’ve had people come up to me and be like, “at made me feel like shit when I was in the movie theatre and everyone was laughing about that.” And I don’t want anyone to have that experience watching our movies.’

Departing the Apatow fold a er that string of hits was an organic transition, he says, devoid of drama – more open relationship than bitter divorce. But wasn’t it complicated, at least? ‘It was and it

‘I THINK ENTIRE PARTS OF CULTURE WILL JUST BE DEEMED REGRESSIVE AND NO ONE WILL WATCH IT ANYMORE, AND THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE OUR MOVIES WILL FIT INTO THAT CATEGORY’

wasn’t,’ he said. Over a decade ago, he explained, there was a project – 50/50 – that they’d approached Apatow to produce. But because Apatow was working on his

lm Funny People, which overlapped thematically, he declined, so Rogen and Goldberg chose to try their hand at producing themselves.

It was a revelation. Now they could manage their work as well as create it. ‘I’ve grown to appreciate acting in things that we control. I get uncomfortable when

I’m involved in something but I don’t control it from the beginning to the end,’ he said. ‘When I act in someone else’s movie but I’m not the producer of it, I don’t have a lot of say in how that movie is marketed or presented to the world, and that makes me uncomfortable. e idea of acting in movies we aren’t producing is a little scary to me at times.’

When I observed that he and Apatow haven’t worked together since he started his production company, in 2011, Rogen referred me to Apatow’s cameo in The Disaster Artist and pointed out that Leslie Mann, Apatow’s wife, starred in Blockers, the 2018 comedy that Point Grey produced.

When I asked what it was like going from being Apatow’s protégé to his competition, he gently corrected me: Not competition. ‘Peers.’

A schism would have been wildly out of character for Rogen, anyway. His is not a trail littered with the carcasses of broken relationships. He and Goldberg

– the presumptive ‘we’ in all of his conversations about work – have ‘known each other since we were 12, so we really developed our personalities together in a lot of ways.’ And over the years, Rogen has repeatedly collaborated with other allies, including the directors Nicholas Stoller (the Neighbors movies) and Jonathan Levine (50/50, Long Shot), as well as his frequent actor coconspirators: James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny Mcbride, Paul Rudd.

hhis lack of major trauma is something Rogen talks about a lot with his wife, the other enduring, consistent relationship in his life. He and Millerrogen, a fellow actor-writer-director, have been together since 2004 – their friends were dating, and it was a semi-setup situation – and married in 2011. Around the time they started hanging out, Miller-rogen’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and the condition advanced quickly. It was brutal, and Rogen recognised that he had never experienced anything like it in his own life.

at lack of personal devastation is something he’s become ‘very conscious of, especially when you’re married to someone who is constantly living under the crushing weight of it. You get very aware of it very quickly. I have a lot of friends whose parents have died, who have had disastrous things happen to them and their family, so

I’m very aware that I’m lucky and that I probably have a lot of terrible things coming my way.’

Because they’re in their 30s and have been together

for ages, people bug him (a little) and his wife (a lot more) about having kids, which, for the record, is something they might do one day. ey talk about adopting, but are in no particular rush. ‘We very much like our lives, so we’ll continue to put it o , it seems like, for a little while,’ he said. ‘We have a dog. We like the dog a lot.’ It’s not the responsibility that frightens them so much as the potential for complicating an already harmonious situation.

‘I’ve had my friends be like, “Yeah, it really was hard on our relationship.” I’m not saying we couldn’t overcome it, but, again, we really get along and have a very good dynamic. She works very hard, and a lot as well, so when we’re together, we really try to enjoy each other and hang out.’ e Miller-rogens are domestic animals, more inclined to stay home and crush Million Dollar Listing shows than furiously socialise.

Rogen’s understated and somewhat incredulous relationship to fame gives him a certain credibility with fans: he’s a tour guide with a backstage pass.

His stories of surreal encounters with public

gures – Kanye turning up unannounced at his door one morning, asking him to play basketball; introducing Tom Cruise to the concept of Internet porn – kill on late-night TV by depicting the deranged alternate universe of celebrity (actually a small village where they all know one another) and the various ways its inhabitants can fall out of touch with reality.

‘I’ve worked with enough actors to know that on the grand scale of actors I’m pretty well-adjusted,’ he said. ‘I think on the grand scale of humans, I have friends who are constantly reminding me that I have very little insight into the struggles of the average person. It’s not lost on me that there are massive elements of life that I just don’t have to deal with. I’m aware of it, but it limits the amount of true grounding I can have, I think. At the same time, I do think I try to steer away from being a crazy person as much as humanly possible, in an active way.’

weed helps. For 20-plus years it has been as essential to his daily life as his glasses and shoes – an unremarkable habit that’s nevertheless constantly remarked upon. Not coincidentally, it’s also powerful medicine for taming the ego and maintaining cosmic perspective. ‘Not a lot of people have delusions of grandeur when they’re high,’ Rogen agreed.

‘ at’s what cocaine is for.’

e not-inaccurate stoner persona contributes to his easy interaction with fans, since it’s another way he’s not bullshitting the world, on some fundamental level, about who he is. ‘What’s nice is when I meet those guys, who took a picture with me earlier,’ he said at Canter’s. ‘I don’t feel like I’ve lied to those people.

at’s probably one of the reasons that they like me, it’s that they don’t feel I’ve lied to them. at’s a dynamic I like. When it comes to me being a person out there in the world, I don’t care if people think I’m fucking smart or some genius – the fact that they don’t think I’m lying to them to get them to go see my movies is something I appreciate.’

‘NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR WHEN THEY’RE HIGH ON WEED . THAT’S WHAT COCAINE IS FOR’