Seth Rogen and the Science of Rogenomics

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 afternoon in April, Seth Rogen was sitting in a corner booth in the back of Canter's Deli on Fairfax, awaiting his matzo-ball soup. Over the years he's celebrated birthdays here, in the Kibitz Room bar, and, in the era before he had offices, 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 waitstaff. Almost immediately, Rogen—bearded, bespectacled, becapped—was approached by some blokes apologetically asking for a picture. He obliged, grabbing their phones and mugging for two-second intervals. “Taking the picture myself was a big evolution,” he said after they'd gone. “That 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 this past spring, for example, he announced a multi-platform deal between Point Grey—his production company with creative partner Evan Goldberg—and Lionsgate, and launched a weed brand emphasizing consumer education, Houseplant, in his native Canada. In addition to developing, writing, and acting in his own film projects, Rogen produces television (Preacher, Future Man, Black Monday, The Boys), does voice work (Sausage Party, the upcoming 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. That lingering low-achieving persona of his old characters, though, might be a blessing, since it has 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. The man, like the myth, may be a burner, but he's also a machine.

“I really always worked hard, because I recognized from a pretty young age it was one of the only things I could control,” Rogen said. “I remember I did karate as a kid, at the Jewish Community Center, and when I started I was the worst in the class, I was the worst of 25 Jewish 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 Jewish kids who were worse than me. And that was always tangible: Just by not stopping I became the best one. It wasn't this, like, ferocious leap. I just kept going, and slowly [other] people stopped. Because a lot of people will stop.”

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Rogen was just back from CinemaCon in Las Vegas, where he'd been deployed to charm a group of international theater 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 toward 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 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 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 center 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.”

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. 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—they're a Jewish couple” both worked for government agencies, his mother as a social worker who specialized in teaching parenting skills, and his father for the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities. Sandy, Rogen's mom, has a popular Twitter account—capsule movie reviews, wine appreciation, domestic observations, and hefty doses of maternal pride—that indicates a strong comedic voice of her own. (Sample tweet: “When you wear a big heavy coat no one can tell when you fart”). These days, she teaches kundalini yoga. “Me and her 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 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—and he didn't like that they would get washed at different frequencies and would have different thicknesses when they were paired. So he numbered each of his pairs of socks—1–1, 2–2, 3–3—so that he knew that the 2s 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 is a very specific personality.”

As he gets older, Rogen notices he has more in common with his creators than he previously imagined. Lately he's recognized 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 colors. He'll wear pretty bright purses, generally speaking. He buys his own, like a Le Sportsac or Kipling purse. 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, you motherfucker?’ ” He sighed. “This 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: This might not be a disaster.” 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 confidence—unusual at any age, but practically brazen during early adolescence—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 learned that stand-up comedy can be a very tough world to grow alliances in and find support in. If I met a fucking 14-year-old kid who was trying to do what I was doing, my first 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. That, 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 Los Angeles, 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 will make more money than I made my entire life.’ ” That 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 prioritized 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 college network comedy Undeclared. Their association would bring them mutual glory and enrichment in the end, but first there were disappointments to endure. After both shows were canceled after one season, Rogen was pissed off and depressed. The 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. “That was making me angry as well. I knew deep down they deserved it more, so that was annoying.”

But when Goldberg finished college and joined him in L.A., the two directed their energies toward finishing the script for Superbad and writing Pineapple Express. To keep them afloat financially, Apatow tossed them occasional rewriting jobs, and in 2004, they were hired as writers on Da Ali G Show, effectively ending the fallow period for good. Over the next few years, Rogen and Apatow worked together on, among other films, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, and Pineapple Express—making Rogen a star.

He is aware that some of the work from that period has not aged well. “Evan recently was like, ‘By the time my kids are grown, all of our work will be deemed unwatchable.’ He's like, ‘I have no doubt about it. I think entire parts of culture will just be deemed regressive and no one will fucking watch it anymore, and there's a good chance our movies will fit 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 do not want people to feel bad when they're watching our movies. I've had people come up to me and be like, ‘That made me feel like shit when I was in the movie theater and everyone was laughing about that.’ Like the ‘How I know you're gay’ thing [from The 40-Year-Old Virgin], it's something people have been like, ‘It's not fun to be in the theater when people are laughing at that, knowing what they're probably actually laughing at.’ And I don't want anyone to have that experience watching our movies.” He laughed and—comedian's reflex—dashed off a throwaway zing: “That's why Todd Phillips makes movies. Let him have that.”

Departing the Apatow fold after 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 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 film 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, citing exceptions, like working with Danny Boyle on Steve Jobs. “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.… The idea of acting in movies we are not 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 co-conspirators: James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd.

His lack of major trauma is something Rogen talks about a lot with his wife, the other enduring, consistent relationship in his life. He and Miller-Rogen, 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 recognized that he had never experienced anything like it in his own life. That lack of personal devastation is something he's become “very conscious of, especially when you're married to someone who is constantly, daily 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've had disastrous things happen to them and their family, so I am very aware that I'm very 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. They talk about adopting, but are in no particular rush. “We very much like our lives, so we will continue to put it off, 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.” The Miller-Rogens are domestic animals, more inclined to stay home and crush HGTV or the Million Dollar Listing shows than furiously socialize.

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, an Everyman moving through hallucinatory worlds—and who can't, on some level, relate to that? His stories of surreal encounters with public figures—Kanye turning up unannounced at his door one morning, asking him to play basketball; negging Paul Ryan's request for a selfie, in front of his children; introducing Tom Cruise to the concept of Internet porn—kill on late-night TV and Howard Stern 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. “That's what cocaine is for.”

The 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. That's probably one of the reasons that they like me, is that they don't feel I've lied to them. That'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 or how hardworking they think I am—the fact that they don't think I'm lying to them to get them to go see my movies is something I appreciate.”

The day after Canter's, Rogen arrived at the Hand of Destiny ceramics studio on Beverly Boulevard for a private session at the wheel.

Very quickly it became clear that he had done this before. He can cone! He knows how to use the shaping tools! It turned out Rogen has taken classes with his wife and finds working with clay soothing: “There's something that's so therapeutic about it. It's like yoga, if you got a thing at the end. If you were doing yoga and then some object was produced at the end of it.” In the time it took me to form one wee, homely vessel, Rogen produced two immaculate, symmetrical ashtray/pot situations. (As followers of his Instagram know, Rogen is an ashtray aficionado and collector.) Destiny, our teacher and a master potter, who I'm pretty sure had no idea who he was, murmured words of praise.

To understand how Rogen manages his various silos without collapsing them, I asked him to walk me through his typical schedule. He hesitated; every day is different. That morning, for example, he got up at 6:45—normal, but the early side of normal—worked out at home, made coffee, and sat with his dog. He wrote for an hour on Invincible, a comic-book movie he's writing with Goldberg, then took a long call about Houseplant, the new cannabis company. Point Grey's offices recently moved off the Sony lot to Sunset Boulevard, near his house, so after the call he popped over to check in on the edit for the as-yet-untitled comedy, written by Simon Rich, in which Rogen plays dual leading roles. He ate lunch in five minutes and then came here to throw some pots. After this, he was meeting with a storyboard artist for a movie he and Goldberg are hoping to direct at the beginning of next year.

“I'm fully able to bounce, and I quite like it,” said Rogen of all the quick pivots. “Every once in a while it's a lot, but if I don't feel overwhelmed and I feel like we have enough time to do everything, then yeah, I find it really stimulating and invigorating. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing, in a non-sociopathic way.”

Lately, he's been examining his own motivations for choosing projects, and sometimes they don't bear up under scrutiny. “I've tried to sharpen my sense in recognizing when I'm acting out of hubris and when I feel like I may be doing something just 'cause of how fucking cool I'll seem once I did it, how smart everyone will think I am once I did it,” he said. “I think as you become successful and famous, gravity will pull you toward hubris and just trying to fly straight is not enough. You have to steer away from it. Because if you just try to go straight, you'll get pulled into it. And that's something, even still, every once in awhile, I'm like, ‘We gotta jerk this wheel.’ We're getting pulled into it slowly, because everyone else around you is like, ‘Yeah, do it, it's a good idea, here's money, take it, do it, we want it.’ And you have to be like, ‘No. That's not a good idea.’ ”

On the other hand, he said, a surplus of confidence can lead to breakthroughs: “It is a fine line, because I do look at Kanye, for example, and I remember the truth is at first, people were like, ‘Why you making shoes, man? Just make music.’ And his shoes are great. People love them. He's made Adidas billions of dollars. So there is something to be said for staying in your lane, but sometimes people do really great outside of their lane,” Rogen said. “Kanye kept going on about this theater experience he wanted to make. He wanted a movie to play on eight screens: There's one in front of you, two above you, two on the side of you and, like, below you. And I did have this thought like, Dude, you have made some of the greatest rap albums of all time, and I'm sitting there, like, Why are you trying to design movie theaters? Just keep making these great fucking rap albums. But who am I to say that? He made shoes that are cool, I like 'em, I wear them sometimes. So it's something that I look at with myself: How much do you expand? How much do you try new things? How much do you spread your wings, or how much do you stay in your lane? It's a constant modulation.”

Rogen's ashtrays were finished, and he handed them over to Destiny. As he prepared to leave, I looked at the pots we had just made, neatly lined up on the counter, waiting to be glazed and fired. He was right: It was satisfying to have an object to show for your efforts. But Rogen had no chance to dwell. The clay interlude was over, and he was expected at the next appointment.

Caroline McCloskey is a writer living in Los Angeles.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2019 issue with the title "Rogenomics."

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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Sebastian Mader
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Johnny Hernandez using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation
Manicure by Mariel Pizarro
Set design by Colin Donahue for Owl and the Elephant
Produced by North Six

Originally Appeared on GQ