South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
CELEBRITIES Rogen strikes unlikeable balance
Despite his long-established reputation of playing put-upon nice guys, Seth Rogen wants to make it clear: He does not want you to like him this time. He doesn’t even like him this time.
“I think a lot of people feel like they have to like the people they are playing,” Rogen says. “Oh, God, I don’t at all. Like, I do not like him.”
The producer and co-star of “Pam & Tommy” is enjoying his first Emmy nomination for acting. He was a driving force in the creation of the doubledigit-nominated limited series springing from a Rolling Stone article by Amanda Chicago Lewis about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous sex tape made public.
“I assumed it was something they put out into the world. I assumed they were profiting from it,” Rogen says of the leaked video. “I completely had it wrong and, in fact, the understanding I had was incredibly destructive in a lot of ways, on many levels.”
His surprise at a popular narrative being completely upended was something he wanted audiences to share. He wasn’t going to play Tommy Lee, the bad-boy drummer of Motley Crue. He certainly wasn’t going to play iconic ’90s sex symbol Pamela Anderson. Those roles went to Sebastian Stan and Lily James. That left Rand Gauthier, the scrabbling handyman and sometimesporn actor who stole the couple’s intimate video. The problem? Rogen’s innate likability.
“I wanted the audience to get the guy, but the danger for me was having the audience like the guy,” Rogen says of finding the line between empathy and sympathy for someone who did something objectively terrible.
The series portrays Gauthier as a struggling sad sack, still in love with his porn-actor ex-wife. He does some work for
Lee and is understandably chagrined when the rocker not only refuses to pay, but also threatens him with a firearm (per Gauthier’s account).
Rogen didn’t speak with Gauthier but got access to the full-length, “raw, raw
... sprawling” interview he gave to Rolling Stone. “The real guy was maybe a little angrier and was maybe just a little bit worse of a guy. He’s probably less sympathetic than the character that I portray. Honestly, there’s little things like ... he was casually racist at times in the interview.”
While Rogen and company engineered their way into an understanding of the character, Rogen notes he could only guess at Gauthier’s actual motives, as he has never met the real person. And he doesn’t particularly want to.
“I’m not incredibly interested in what he has to say about anything,” Rogen says, disdaining how little Gauthier considered the effects of his actions, especially on Anderson. “If I saw him from across the room, I’d be like, ‘No, I’m fine. I’ll hang out over here.’ ”
He laughed heartily.
Aug. 28 birthdays: Actor Marla Adams is 84. Actor Ken Jenkins is 82. Actor David Soul is 79. Actor Daniel Stern is 65. Actor Jennifer Coolidge is 61. Singer Shania Twain is
57. Actor Jack Black is 53. Singer Jake Owen is 41. Singer LeAnn Rimes is 40. Singer Florence Welch is
36. Actor Kyle Massey is 31. Actor Quvenzhane Wallis is 19.