  Canadian slacker/stoner specialist Seth Rogen’s comedic talent is on full display in Knocked Up (also featuring Iris Apatow). |
LOS ANGELES — The most unlikely leading man of the summer is a deep-voiced young Canadian, somewhat less bulky than Shrek, and possessed of a fine, curly head of hair (a “Jewfro” as he calls it).
And his take on his first on-screen love scene — with the lovely Katherine Heigl — is not exactly what you’d hear from Brad Pitt.
“It’s really kind of nerve-racking,” Seth Rogen says of his onscreen lovemaking in the hilarious Knocked Up. “If I was 18-years-old, that would literally be as far as I ever went with a girl.
“You’re essentially dry-humping a girl — I don’t know if I can say that or not, but I’m going to say it — who you don’t know very well. And I was just afraid I was going to sweat on her, a great gob of sweat on to her forehead.”
There, in that amiably provocative, utterly honest statement, is the essence of Rogen’s character, both onscreen and off. It’s how he came off in his scene-stealing role as the pot-smoking, porn-fan buddy in The 40 Year Old Virgin (directed by his best friend and mentor, Judd Apatow, who convinced him to move from Vancouver at age 16 to join the cast of his TV series, Freaks And Geeks).
And it’s Rogen in spades in Knocked Up, which he co-wrote with Apatow, a comedy about a beautiful, ambitious TV entertainment reporter (Heigl) who becomes pregnant from a drunken one-night-stand with a pot-smoking slacker and tries to salvage the situation and give the guy a chance. In a summer of overblown sequels, it’s being tagged as another sleeper hit a la The 40 Year Old Virgin.
In Knocked Up, Rogen even plays a Jewish twentysomething from Vancouver named Seth. “Having no real skills, I always try to play characters close to myself,” Rogen says, “(as for being cast as Canadian), I still say ‘sorry’ instead of ‘saw-ry’ and Judd is just tired of editing around it.”
The slacker part, however, is just acting. In fact, the preternaturally-talented Rogen began performing standup in Vancouver at 13, and with a friend at 14 began writing Superbad, the comedy about his high school that’s finally being released in August. (In a classy touch of verisimilitude, he’s had many of his old schoolmates at Vancouver’s Point Grey Secondary sign releases so he could use their actual names in the film).
“Someone gave me a tape of actors reading generic scenes for Freaks And Geeks, and Seth was really funny and seemed real,” Apatow said. “You could just see the light was on him. He’d think things only a great comic would think of, even at 16-years-old. It was like he was born a fully-formed comedic personality. So when that got cancelled we did (the short-lived series) Undeclared, and I made him a writer.”
More importantly, Rogen joined the gang of Apatow-related actors and writers known as the Frat Pack (whose ranks include Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, etc. and Freaks And Geeks veterans like James Franco).
“Looking back, it was just a great show and we all got along really well,” Rogen says. “I think that’s why we all want to keep working together.” (Other F And G alumnus in Knocked Up include Jason Segel and Martin Starr, real-life best friends playing Seth’s best friends).
“I just finished a movie with James Franco (The Pineapple Express, which Rogen wrote and in which he co-stars), and we just kept looking at each other and said, ‘If you told us eight years ago they’d allow us to be in a movie that we’re the stars of, I’d never have believed it.”
Coming soon: Even more Seth Rogen!
The Seth Rogen era is just getting started. Here are three films you’ll see him in soon:
Superbad (in which Knocked Up’s Jonah Hill plays the young Seth). “Our prime directive was to bring back the teen comedy, maybe from Fast Times (At Ridgemont High) and stuff we really like. We were 14 when we started writing it, and it was born out of a very pure desire to see kids acting how we acted on film and speaking how we spoke. It just happened to be really dirty and it made us laugh. There was no indication it would ever get made. We just wanted to amuse ourselves.”
The Pineapple Express (in which he co-stars with James Franco). “It’s a marijuana-themed buddy comedy kind of like, say, 48 Hours or Midnight Run. Action-wise, it’s pretty jam-packed. We got car chases, explosions and me holding machine guns, which is amusing to me. I hope other people find it entertaining.”
Fanboys. About four friends trying to fulfil a dying friend’s wish to see Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch — engaging in geek skirmishes between Trekkies and Star Wars fans along the way. “I haven’t seen it, but I play several small characters throughout. My good friend (Knocked Up’s) Jay Baruchel is in it. I hope my scenes are funny. They seemed funny as we did it.”
More Artists
