In Seth Rogen’s new satirical series, The Studio, Rogen plays the newly appointed head of a major Hollywood production company – and there was a time when that alone would have been the joke.
The goofy, schlubby, pre-eminent manchild of mainstream comedy, handed the role of a powerful industry suit – the fish-out-of-water jokes would have written themselves. But Matt Remick, Rogen’s character in The Studio, isn’t a manchild but a man: a pretty regular middle-aged one, trying to do good, honest work in a sour, cynical business.
It’s the industry around Matt, rather, that appears stuck in a state of arrested development, as he’s handed one lazy, juvenile, IP-milking movie pitch after another (including a Kool-Aid origin story that sounds almost too plausible to be parodic) while trying to hold on to his soul.
Back in the mid-2000s, Rogen broke through in Hollywood as the very picture of wise-cracking, dope-smoking slackerdom; nearly 20 years later, the Canadian actor and filmmaker is perilously close to playing the straight man. Off-screen, too, Rogen has shaped up and grown up, even if he remains the most enthusiastic marijuana advocate in showbiz. The Studio, which he devised and directed with his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg, may be the crispest embodiment yet of Rogen’s more mature persona, but it’s not an abrupt about-face: now 42, the star has been quietly and cannily tweaking his public and professional image over the years, correcting past missteps and modelling a progressive attitude where many straight white dudebro comics have turned bitter or defensive against the perceived onset of new, “woke” industry standards.
“The complaint that comedy’s harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint,” Rogen said in an Esquire interview earlier this year. “Maybe it was too easy before. And why should it be? Why shouldn’t it be hard? I like that my job is hard, because I’m trying to do something that requires a huge amount of resources and people’s time and energy.”
The quote went viral, attracting applause from critics and viewers, weary of more entrenched, demographically predictable culture-war positions. Funny, perceptive and sufficiently switched on to have attracted guest stars ranging from Martin Scorsese to Sarah Polley to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, The Studio suggests Rogen is coping just fine with that degree of difficulty.
The younger, hotter-headed Rogen may not have recognised such gentle diplomacy. Raised in a middle-class Jewish household in Vancouver, the young Rogen saw his family background as material for irreverent stand-up routines before, aged just 16, landing a role as an acerbic high-school outcast in Judd Apatow’s cult teen TV series Freaks and Geeks.
The gig gained Rogen a steady place in Apatow’s so-called comic “frat pack,” and it was Apatow who gave Rogen, at 25, his first starring vehicle. In the hit 2007 romcom Knocked Up, he and Katherine Heigl, then hot property from TV’s Grey’s Anatomy, played reluctant parents-to-be following a drunken one-night stand. It was a classic comedy of mismatch, mining laughs from the friction between Heigl’s Type-A career-woman character and Rogen’s shaggy stoner; though it was well received at the time, its hard, blank female characterisation and sympathetic stance toward male jocularity would meet with more criticism in a post-#MeToo age.
Heigl herself was a sceptic at the time, stating in interviews not long after the film’s release that she found it “a little sexist”: “It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” Rogen, pressed for a response by radio shock-jock Howard Stern, responded rashly. “It’s not like we’re the only people she said some batshit crazy things about,” he said. “That’s kind of her bag now.”
Rogen would walk back these comments years later, though this minor feud cast both stars’ images in stone for a few years. Heigl, sure enough, was branded as humourless and uptight and hard to work with, as her career momentum soon stalled; Rogen, depending on your point of view, was either a fun hang or a boorish loose cannon. Either way, he was better business. In the same summer as Knocked Up, the broad, lewd teen comedy Superbad – which he wrote with Goldberg, and in which he played a supporting role – became an instant generational touchstone, cementing the distinctiveness of Rogen’s comic voice both on and off camera.
That swift one-two of unexpected blockbusters cued a steady stream of work for the unlikely star, including such scattershot vehicles as Observe and Report and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and a green light for his own most indulgent projects: together with indie director David Gordon Green, he and Goldberg attempted to resurrect the moribund stoner-comedy genre with the daft, suitably incoherent Pineapple Express, the moderate commercial success of which seems a generous effect of the Knocked Up/Superbad afterglow. Other writing credits went less well: the Owen Wilson comedy was a witless dud, The Green Hornet an expensive superhero flop, The Watch an instantly forgettable (and forgotten) sci-fi caper. Still, he and Goldberg retained enough studio goodwill to make their joint directorial debut with 2013’s mildly amusing apocalypse comedy This Is the End, only for the following year’s political satire The Interview to effectively end their directing careers after the premise of the film, starring Rogen and regular collaborator James Franco as hapless journalists recruited to assassinate Kim Jong-un, attracted the ire of the North Korean government. Sony largely nixed its theatrical release.
On screen, meanwhile, Rogen alternated between playing oafishly to type and pushing subtly against it: he was a schlub in Polley’s 2012 romantic drama Take This Waltz, but a wounded, tender one, and a gentle foil to Barbra Streisand’s overbearing Jewish mother stereotype in The Guilt Trip. As the long-suffering tech entrepreneur Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle’s biopic Steve Jobs, he made a bid for prestige thespian credibility, while even in more tailored comic fare like the hit Neighbors films, he admitted some growth, taking the part of the weary family man to Zac Efron’s heedless hedonist.
But it was 2019’s Long Shot, which returned him to the romantic comedy genre opposite Charlize Theron, that most clearly exemplified the new-model Rogen as he approached 40.
As an unemployed journo hired as a speechwriter for Theron’s sleek presidential candidate, he was still scruffy, still offbeat, but softly, sweetly so: in contrast to Knocked Up, the film’s Pygmalion-style narrative necessitated more change on the man’s part than the woman’s. And in Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic autofiction The Fabelmans he was unimpeachably gentle as one of the most sympathetic homewreckers in all of cinema, seducing Michelle Williams’s matriarch with unspoken puppy-dog longing.
In person, Rogen has made up for any earlier indiscretions with an unblotted nice-guy reputation: if the public knows little about his 20-year, intentionally child-free relationship with actress and writer Lauren Miller, that’s exactly the way he wants it.
His only personal relationship to garner any scrutiny is his former friendship with Franco, whose star has fallen in the wake of multiple sexual misconduct allegations — though Rogen once stated his intent to keep working with the embattled actor, he’s since cut ties entirely. Asked by a Sunday Times journalist if the estrangement was painful, his answer was guarded: “Not as painful and difficult as it is for a lot of other people involved. I have no pity for myself in this situation.”
In interviews, he prefers to talk about his ceramics hobby and his unflagging weed habit — both of which he’s combined into a surprisingly elegant lifestyle brand, Houseplant — and remains proudly outspoken on political matters. His condemnation of Zionism (“I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel,” he said on a Marc Maron podcast in 2020) has aroused controversy for which he has steadfastly not apologised.
For Rogen, niceness needn’t equal blandness — just as The Studio, prickly and pointed in all the right places, proves that “mature” comedy isn’t the safer route.
