Seth Rogen is the voice for a Blob-like character in the animated hit movie Monsters Vs. Aliens.

LOS ANGELES -- Svelte, styling Seth Rogen is the luckiest man alive.

This if you believe Playboy -- and in these stressful uncertain times, why wouldn't you?

"It was an honour. I just had to date Hugh Hefner for three years," says the newly trim Rogen, only the ninth male to grace the magazine's cover. (Others include Steve Martin, Gene Simmons, Jerry Seinfeld and Peter Sellers.)

And let's face it, even if he wasn't kidding, he'd still be viewed as among humanity's most fortunate.

Consider: An aspiring comic from Vancouver just a decade ago, the 26-year-old Rogen is now one of Hollywood's brightest comedic performers, thanks to his thievery of scenes in Judd Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin and subsequent stardom in Knocked Up and Pineapple Express.

His workload is dauntless. At today's news conference at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, for example, he is promoting Monsters Vs. Aliens, a 3-D kid-friendly comedy populated by Hollywood heavyweights. It's now playing.

Then next week he ventures into hard-edged satire with Observe and Report, as a shopping mall rent-a-cop with a borderline personality -- or as it's been described "Travis Bickle: Mall Cop," referring to Robert De Niro's disturbed loner in Taxi Driver.

It will be followed this summer by Apatow's next directorial effort, Funny People, in which Rogen plays the protege of Adam Sandler's troubled stand-up comic.

But back to Monsters Vs. Aliens. In it, Rogen voices B.O.B. (short for benzoate-ostylezene-bicarbonate), a chemically altered ranch-flavoured dessert topping that was combined by scientists with a genetically altered tomato.

The resulting creature -- a gelatinous one-eyed mass with purposeful echoes of 1950s B-movie icon the Blob -- is kept under lock and key by the U.S. military, alongside such other oddities as Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), 49-foot-tall woman Ginormica (Reese Witherspoon) and aquatic ape-man The Missing Link (Will Arnett). When alien invaders attack the planet, the monsters are called into action to defend humanity.

"Normally my roles are pretty intellectually deep so it was nice to shed those shackles," says Rogen, who after providing voices for Shrek The Third and Kung Fu Panda, presumably has a handle on the family-friendly animation arena.

"My first concern was how I can be funny without profanity. It was a fear I had. But the answer is if you get very clever people to animate you, it makes up for all the profanity in the world. It actually makes quite a delightful movie. So those guys did it."

The limits on language aside, Rogen -- like other comic actors such as Shrek's Mike Myers -- says he finds the medium freeing.

"It's a little different from the usual filmmaking process, but in a good way because it's performance-based. There are no marks to hit or cameras or lights. You just stand there and talk. What I liked is, when you're shooting a live-action movie, you have to know what you're doing by the time you show up on set or else it won't match the rest of the movie and you have essentially failed.

"But with a movie like this, halfway through the process, if you realize, 'I should have been doing this the whole time, it would have been funnier' then they'll be like 'In three hours we can re-record everything you've done up until now.' If you stumble across a funnier way to do something, you haven't ruined anything; you can go back and redo what you've done. That's what I liked about it."

So how much of Seth is there in his blue alter-ego?

Rogen admits some people have told him they can recognize him in B.O.B.'s dopey grin. And there's this: "I think my wide-eyed enthusiasm, I share with my character. And a general good mood? I think I share that with my character also."

What's the deal with Green Hornet?

Here's the skinny on The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen's first foray into superhero action.

Yes, the movie, an adaptation of the pulp fiction crime-fighter who vanquished fiends alongside his kung-fu-kicking chauffeur Kato, will shoot this year for a summer 2010 release. Yes, French filmmaker Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is directing. And yes, the movie's extensive action sequences inspired Rogen to shed his extra poundage. Ever since the project -- which Rogen penned with his Superbad co-writer Evan Goldberg -- was announced, it has been besieged by questions regarding its tone, style and content. Namely, will it be a spoof of the genre? Could it possibly be a pedal-to-the-metal action flick? Or, like last summer's Pineapple Express, a marriage of both?

Rogen suggests the third option. "Action and comedy aren't mutually exclusive. I think you can have a big action epic with a bunch of funny parts. I saw the early Indiana Jones movies in the theatre and they killed. There are laughs all the way through the whole thing, but it doesn't feel like a comedy per se. It's just trying to elicit reactions from the audience. We think of movies like True Lies and that's more what we're going for with this."

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