It's Seth Rogen's turn to be the star. After his supporting role in Anchorman, Steve Carell got the lead in Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Now for his follow-up, sidekick Rogen gets the lead. He plays a stoner trying to start a celebrity nudity website (unbeknownst of Mrskin.com) who hooks up with the beautiful Katherine Heigl one night. Thanks to a condom mishap, she gets pregnant and now the broke loser has to step up.
CraveOnline: Even fake movie sex scenes with Katherine Heigl must have been awesome. Were they as great to shoot as it looked?
Seth Rogen: Yeah, it’s really kind of nerve wracking, you know. If I was 18 years old, I’d literally be as far as I’ve ever been with a girl. Essentially you’re dry humping. I don’t know if you can say that, but I’ll say it. You’re dry humping a girl who you don’t know very well and I was just afraid I was going to sweat on her. That was my major concern, that I was going to drip a big gob of sweat on her head. It’s nerves, but luckily they’re comedic sex scenes, supposedly. So that kind of helps. It’s not like I’m supposed to be acting sexy. There’s lines like, "This is my new record" in there so that kind of alleviates some of the pressure that would be put on me to look attractive and sexy, which is nice.
CraveOnline: Was Porky’s or any other sex comedy an influence on you when you were a kid?
Seth Rogen: Porky’s, you mean the highest grossing Canadian film of all time! Yes, that was. Porky’s was one of those films. When they played it in Canada, I would tape bits of it, the nude scenes and compile them. So I’ve seen the nine minutes of Porky’s where people are naked 1000 times over and over. The rest I’ve recently caught up on, but that introduced me to adulthood, Porky’s.
Seth Rogen: Bachelor Party was a movie I always liked. It’s pretty dirty for a Tom Hanks movie. There’s some bestiality jokes in there and stuff like that, that would always shock me. Kevin Smith was an inspiration language wise, I would say. His movies were the first that I saw that people were cursing up a storm and that was very amusing to me, so I think we took a nod from that, definitely when it comes to sexual language anyway.
CraveOnline: Are you ready to be the lead in another romantic comedy?
Seth Rogen: We’ll see. I don’t know. It’s a strange concept, I guess, that romance is what people want to see me do but I had fun, I’d keep doing it, sure!
CraveOnline: Were you familiar with the site Mr. Skin before making this movie?
Seth Rogen: No…(long pause). Yes, of course I was. Originally in the movie, there was no Mr. Skin. I can’t remember how it actually played out, but the movie originally took place in a universe that Mr. Skin did not exist, and it really started to amuse us, the notion that Mr. Skin did exist and we just hadn’t heard of it. It just made us laugh a lot as we were writing, so that’s where that kind of came from. Yeah, definitely, the idea for our webpage came from Mr. Skin.
CraveOnline: Was there as much improv here as in 40-Year-Old Virgin?
Seth Rogen: Yes, there was tons of improv in all the scenes, especially the ones with me and my friends. We hired my actual friends because we always hope for those dynamics to kind of show on film. Our hope was to be able to tell we were all friends and we actually all know each other really well and the best way to get that stuff out is just through improv'ing and letting loose. The actual dynamics play out of it. Generally, we shoot the script once or twice and then we just kind of go off. Harold Ramis put it well, he was talking about it, and he said when he did Ghostbusters and stuff, he would always say, "The script is the worst case scenario. The script is what we have if we can’t think of anything better." That’s pretty much what we do, and it was a pretty good script to begin with, so it was a pretty good worse case scenario we all thought. But, we basically said whatever came up. The whole Munich thing, that wasn’t even implied in the script at all. That stuff just comes up as you’re shooting.
CraveOnline: You're a new star to a lot of people, so what was your background?
Seth Rogan: As far as my past goes, I started doing stand-up in Vancouver around when I was thirteen and then I got cast for Freaks and Geeks, by Judd, when I was 16 and I moved to LA, and sunk my claws into him and haven’t let go ever since.
CraveOnline: How outrageous and R-rated were you at age 13 when you were doing stand up in Vancouver?
Seth Rogen: I was not. I was clean. I didn’t work blue back then. Mostly because my mother came to a lot of my shows I think. I was just embarrassed. My life wasn’t that R-rated back then, I guess. I tried to be truthful to what was going on with my life and my friends and my experiences. Then, it was more about my grandparents and playing video games and my Bar Mitzvah and stuff like that. I hadn’t delved into the filthy world I now occupy.
CraveOnline: Where was it where you first did your stand up?
Seth Rogen: At a lesbian bar in Vancouver called The Lotus. I thought it was Ladies Night. I didn’t really get what was happening.
CraveOnline: How did a 13-year-old get hooked up in a lesbian bar?
Seth Rogen: You sign up. The first time, there’s actually a workshop that was being held at the bar where you go and basically learn. They tell you the loose format for writing a stand-up joke, and then at the end, you go and perform it for everyone. Then, from there, you just start getting invited out, someone there would say, "I know this other guy who runs this other comedy room," and "why don’t you come and do 5 minutes." After that, you kind of get invited to do ten minutes and then you’re kind of making 50 bucks a week and you don’t need to work at McDonalds.
Seth Rogen: Pretty much when I’m not acting, which is often, I guess. Or doing press. Yeah, as soon as I finish doing the Knocked Up promotion, I will start writing again. And between movies, that’s kind of my default mode is sitting in my underwear writing. That’s where I want to be, if no one else expects me to be anywhere else.
CraveOnline: Which creative hat do you enjoy the most?
Seth Rogen: I’ve got to say, with movies like Knocked Up, where I have significant amount of input and Superbad, which we just did, I really love doing them both. It’s hard to pick one. Ideally, I’d just keep doing this and be able to wear both hats at once. I view them, they’re kind of the same thing to me. They’re both kind of making movies, it’s not really compartmentalized in two separate halves of my brain, really. It’s all part of the same goal and I like to be as involved as I can.
Seth Rogen: It's all involving teens, according to the MPAA. That was the big thing. Our prime directive with Superbad was to bring back, unaware of where we were bringing it back from, movies like Fast Times. That stuff we really like and has a really relatable feel to it, and the language feels true to life. We hadn’t really seen that when we started writing Superbad. We were 14 years old when we started writing it. It was born out of a very pure desire to see kids acting as how we acted on film, and speak how we speak and spoke. It just happened to be very dirty. And it’s also just what made us laugh. When me and my writing partner, Evan Goldberg were writing it, we were teenagers in Vancouver. There was no real implication that it would ever get made into something. It was just to amuse ourselves. And unfortunately, really, really filthy jokes is what amuses us, so that’s what we wrote. But, yeah, it was just born out of a desire to see teen characters act like what we acted like when we were in high school.
Seth Rogen: As far as Fanboys, I haven’t seen the final movie. I play several kind of characters throughout it. My good friend, Jay Baruchel is in it, who is here today.Yeah, I don’t know ultimately what my roles in that are. I hope they’re funny. It seemed funny when we did it.
CraveOnline: What’s it like to have the Freaks and Geeks gang back together?
Seth Rogen: It’s amazing. I don’t know, it’s funny, I look back to Freaks and Geeks and I’m terrified how little thought I put into it. I think I was just young and inexperienced and it never really dawned on me that at this time, this was a really great show we were doing and these actors were amazing. It really just seemed so there and given. Looking back, it’s a great show with some really talented people involved, and we all got along really well, so I think that’s why we all want to keep working together. I just finished a movie with James Franco a few days ago, and it was amazing to be able to work together again. We kept looking at each other saying, "If you told us 8 years ago that someone would allow us to be in a movie that we’re the stars of, I would have never believed it." It’s amazing to us.
Seth Rogen: Sexually speaking, Pineapple Express is not nearly as dirty as Superbad or maybe even Knocked Up. It’s not really a sexual movie. It’s more of a marijuana themed, buddy/buddy, comedy, more in the tone of say, 48 Hours or Midnight Run.
Seth Rogen: I mean, action wise, it’s pretty jammed packed. We’ve got car chases and shoot-outs and explosions and me holding many machine guns, which is amusing to me. I hope other people find it entertaining, but when you say you’re making an action comedy, it’s like anything else. We thought it really has to function as really both as an action and as a comedy; with a romantic comedy, it needs to function in those worlds as well. We took that very seriously.
