116ogen 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
random-seeming but necessary act of
ring kissing and part of the pre-release
promotional kabuki that can help nudge a
project towards success. (These are the gatekeepers
who decide whether or not to screen the films, after
all.) Since premiering at South by Southwest 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 Theron. The film, in which Theron 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, The 40-Year-Old
Virgin and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. As in many
of those films, Rogen is romantically paired with
a cool blonde and ingests his share of recreational
drugs. This time, though, his character, whom Rogen
described as “an almost good-case scenario of other
people I’ve played,” has at least the pretence 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 film and cautiously optimistic
about its prospects. “When I like it and am proud of it,
I am definitely 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 first time I had to do that,
and that movie’s fine, I just didn’t love it. It honestly
was not a movie I would have gone out to go see...
“It’s okay, the Russo brothers did fine,” he added,
laughing. “I actually remember standing in my
fucking closet in my apartment on Hayworth, 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, flush with youth and
the success of some films he was plenty proud
of, Rogen and Goldberg were offered what
seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime:
to write – and for Rogen, star in – a film
adaptation of The Green Hornet. “At first we
were like, ‘Great!’” Rogen recalled. Till then, the
pair had enjoyed a large degree of creative input over
the film 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. “They were cheap enough movies that
the studios always had bigger fish to fry,” explained
Rogen. But going from relatively inexpensive comedies
to a $120 million VFX-laden action film was a sudden,vertiginous climb. “What I didn’t appreciate was that
now we were the bigger fish and we would get all the
attention that was being absorbed by other movies
on our earlier movies. I remember telling people,
‘They 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 was like, ‘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 tried-and-true formula: “Twenty
to thirty-five million dollars is where you’re never
going to be their biggest problem. That’s literally
what it is,” said Rogen. “As long as they’re making
some $150 million 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, different
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 fucking 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.”ogen 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. For Americans, it’s
difficult to imagine growing up in a place
that has achieved general consensus on
issues like the environment, gun control, gay
marriage, abortion and health care, but, Rogen
said, “Those are just things that in Canada decades
ago have been put to bed and you don’t really think
about it.”
The Rogens are a family of distinct personalities.
His parents, whose relationship he described as
“exactly what you would imagine, very shticky –R
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