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For years, people have told me that Seth Rogen and I are voice twins.
Sitting across from him at the Middleburg Film Festival, deep in Virginia horse country, even Jeremy, the person recording our conversation, can confirm
that the resemblance is very close. Even so, the year Rogen is having belongs entirely to him.
Coming off the historic Emmy run of “The Studio,” Rogen could have gone anywhere next. He chose to travel into the world of darkly comic relationship drama “The Invite” and the 2D animated world of Alzheimer’s disease with “Tangles,” a one-two punch nobody could have seen coming.
In “The Invite,” Olivia Wilde’s A24 dinner-party indie, Rogen plays Joe, a husband whose fraying marriage gets stress-tested over one excruciating evening with the upstairs neighbors, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. I think it’s his finest hour as an actor. On paper, it sounds like a “another Seth Rogen” role. On screen, he plays it in a way we didn’t expect and he credits Wilde for taking his and Norton’s ideas to heart.
“She could have just not used any of it,” he says. “and I just would not have been as funny in it.”
On the episode of the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, Rogen discusses his one-two punch of “The Invite” and “Tangles,” along with the recently announced “Darkwing Duck” revival at Disney+, the awards-season satire threaded through Season 2 of “The Studio” and how “Steve Jobs” opened a door to a part of the industry he had never been invited into. Listen below!
Among comedians, he says, going dramatic “almost feels like a bit of a cheat code” and he recalls Jonah Hill predicting “Moneyball” (2011) would bring him the most acclaim of his career for doing the least (Hill was right, getting his first Oscar nom for supporting actor).
“Tangles,” on the other hand, is a different kind of gamble. The hand-drawn, black-and-white animated feature, adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir about her mother’s Alzheimer’s and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Leah Nelson, comes from Rogen’s Point Grey Pictures and features his voice alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston and Samira Wiley. In a category ruled by studio franchises, it is the outlier and it took 10 years to make and the Canadian multihyphenate always had his eye on what’s most important. “When we give up on it is when it doesn’t happen,” he says.
Independent Film Company and Sapan Studio open “Tangles” in theaters this year for an awards-qualifying run, with a wider expansion in early 2027. “The Invite” is streaming on HBO Max.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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You’re having quite a year, with two very different movies in “The Invite” and “Tangles.” You’re coming off “The Studio,” and there’s been a lot of anticipation about what you’ll do next. This is quite a one-two punch. How does this moment in your career feel?
I feel very lucky. You only want to hope that you’re learning more in life, that you’re getting better at making choices and that once you’ve decided to do something, you get better at being the best part of the team you can be. It’s incredibly nice and gratifying that, over the last few years, I feel like I’ve been doing work I’m very proud of and pushing myself to do things that are hopefully different from what I’ve done in the past. But I also feel very lucky to have people who have wanted to work with me and have been willing to. And part of it is coincidence. We’ve worked on “Tangles” for 10 years. We didn’t know it was going to come out now. Luck has a lot to do with these things coming to life in a way that makes it seem like I planned it.
Starting with “The Invite,” this might be your finest hour as an actor. On paper, it sounds like a movie Seth Rogen would make. Playing Joe, did you feel you were doing something you hadn’t done before? Did you have one of those out-of-body experiences?
As we were making the movie, I felt like I was being given the opportunity, at least in a movie, to do something that was very representative of my exact comedic, tonal and dramatic taste. What was really amazing about what Olivia did was that she allowed us to affect the tone of the film with our performances. She allowed me to insert humor in moments where it wasn’t originally going to be, which changes the tone of the whole thing. She allowed Edward to give dramatic monologues in places where they weren’t originally going to be. And then she allowed me to make jokes that subverted those moments in ways that weren’t originally scripted.
To me, that was an incredibly new and gratifying feeling. We weren’t just being invited to change the dialogue or our characters throughout the performing process. Olivia was allowing us to change the tone of the film itself with our performances. You could see it happening in real time. You could see that a scene was much funnier than we thought it would be. Or we thought a scene was going to be funny, but it was actually much more intense than we all thought. We were encouraged to play with that and not be too beholden to what it was originally conceived as, but instead feel it out as we were doing it.
I have to give her credit for using my stuff in a way that turned out very well. I throw a lot of stuff out there, and she could have edited this movie in a way that left out some of what I think are the funniest moments I generated as we were making it. The film probably still would have been very good, but I just wouldn’t have been as funny in it.
So I’m very proud that it’s a performance people seem to like, and I genuinely feel it’s one of my funnier performances. I’ve done dramatic work in the past, and I think among comedians it almost feels like a bit of a cheat code. If I’m not funny, everyone leans in a little bit more. I remember Jonah Hill was making “Moneyball,” and he said, “This is going to be the thing that I get the most acclaim for. And it’s for sure the easiest thing I’ve done, because I’m just doing less than I normally do.” And I’ve done things like that. So what’s nice is that I do feel like I was creating comedy throughout this film, and people are appreciating that. It isn’t just because it’s not funny that people are appreciating it, which is something I think a lot of comedians have experienced.
It’s the Jim Carrey cheat code. He gets to do “The Truman Show” and “Eternal Sunshine,” and suddenly we’re all saying, “My God.”
Yes. There was a time when comedians really pursued that and wanted that, and I think it was a very deliberate thing comedians were doing for a while. I totally get it. It’s totally legitimate. It’s just that, to me, I’m very proud of my ability to generate comedy on camera. I’ve always been most proud of my funny work. It’s obviously an honor to get to be in Steven Spielberg movies and things like that are certainly less comedic, and the fact that those filmmakers think I can serve their work in any way is very flattering. But I’m always thinking, if I could also bring my full ability to make this comedic, that would be great. That’s exactly what Olivia really encouraged me to do. So it was very gratifying to be able to bring that.
I love that comedic actors can make that transition so seamlessly. I’m also dying for directors who are known for drama to go the other way. I want to see the Christopher Nolan version of “Superbad.” I want them to take a swing like that.
Apparently, “Digger” is that. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s harder than it looks sometimes. It does go both ways. Comedians try to do drama, and sometimes it’s ill-fitting. Dramatic actors try to do comedy, and sometimes that’s ill-fitting, too. I’m not saying that film is that. I haven’t seen it. But it’s something I’ve seen happen.
Then there’s “Tangles,” which is about as far from “The Invite” as you can get. The animated feature category at the Oscars has been dominated by studio franchises for years, and now we have this hand-drawn, black-and-white film about Alzheimer’s. I think people need to hear the answer to this: How difficult is it to make a movie like this?
Really hard [laughs]. We’ve been working on it for 10 years, and I think maybe the last three years of that were production. So it was about seven years of us internally developing it, but also trying to find financing, putting together a cast that would be appealing to financiers, doing readings and making sure the script was really, really good.
And the movie itself was made incredibly differently. Most animated movies, these big studio ones, are made, then made again, then made again. You screen them, redo the third act, screen them again and redo the first act. This movie couldn’t be made that way. It had to be written and then executed, and we could change almost nothing. It’s hand-drawn, so the process of changing things, should you want to, is incredibly labor-intensive and arduous.
People like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Samira Wiley and Abbi Jacobson, along with so many of the amazing cast members, were honestly really helpful in getting the movie made. So was having a good script and filmmakers who, when those actors got in the room with them, were willing to let them take ownership of the material. It’s so gratifying that the movie even exists. We’ve spent so long working on it.
During those first seven years, how many times did you think, “This isn’t happening?”
I thought it would happen. So many things take a long time to get made. I truly believe that if we give up on it, that’s when it doesn’t happen. Sometimes we don’t give up, and we will bring it into existence through sheer brute force. This felt worth it because it was good. If something is good, I believe you can find a way to make it. “Superbad” took so long to get made. And then there were things like “Pineapple Express” and “Sausage Party,” all these movies we worked on for so long before they were made. To me, 10 years is normal.
“Darkwing Duck” because I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s. Congratulations on the Emmy for “The Muppet Show,” and obviously we have “The Studio” Season 2 coming. But nothing excites me more than this cartoon classic that Mark Hamill has a role in! Did that casting fall into your lap?
The cast is really great. We just cast a Scrooge McDuck who might be the most exciting casting I could ever imagine. I’ll tell you after. But it’s incredible. We’ve been working on it for a very long time. You get caught up in these corporate restructurings, but we’ve been working on “Darkwing Duck” for years and years. I’ve been watching the episodes, and they’re amazing. They’re coming together so well, and the animation is beautiful and really inventive.
I was actually surprised you didn’t go the movie route.
I’m glad we didn’t. The TV nature of it was very appealing to us, honestly. As nice as it is to make a hand-drawn, black-and-white animated film, it’s also nice to extract every penny Disney’s willing to put into a thing. Getting to work in both those ways is nice. But with something like “Darkwing Duck,” we felt that if we were going to do it, it had to be top, top-notch.
Are there other Disney shows from the ’80s and ’90s you’d love to bring back? I think of “TaleSpin,” “Gummi Bears” and “DuckTales.”
I always think of “Flight of the Navigator.” That was a Disney movie, I guess. I would never presume I’d do it, but that’s always been a movie I thought was cool. “Darkwing Duck,” though, I loved. And it’s very meta. It’s funny, I reread those “Calvin and Hobbes” comics recently and I realized they really formed a lot of my personality. Years ago, when we were first talking about doing “Darkwing Duck” again, I rewatched all of it and thought, this is really meta. It really breaks the fourth wall and comments on these shows I was also watching at the same time, at the same age.
If we can get “Gargoyles” back up and running …
That would be great. I did love “Gargoyles.”
Let’s talk about “The Studio” Season 2. There have been a lot of reports from the set: Madonna, the Venice Film Festival. Which real-life awards-season humiliation of yours is going to end up on the show?
You’ll see.
How much does Variety figure into the new season?
I think it comes up. I don’t want to reveal too much, but some of the stuff has made it out publicly into the world a little bit. This idea of playing the awards game as a studio is definitely a theme explored throughout the season.
Do you have a Season 2 equivalent of the Martin Scorsese moment, when viewers see who’s appearing and think, “I can’t believe they got him?” Does Christopher Nolan show up, for example?
We have several of those. Some are really unbelievable, and having to direct these people has been among the most terrifying moments of my entire life. For ourselves, we really tried to be even more ambitious. We wanted to get people we were even bigger fans of and make them even bigger parts of the episodes, if we could. We also wanted to dig deeper into our own feelings about the industry and our own internal conflicts as we go about all this.
Does the awards race feel more or less relevant to you now? Having made “The Studio,” how does it look compared with 15 years ago?
What’s interesting is that until I did the “Steve Jobs” movie, which was pretty deep into my career, I was never part of anything that was on that journey in any capacity. I’d been to TIFF and South by Southwest to premiere things. But that was the first time I went to Telluride, and then we were in the New York Film Festival. Honestly, it was like a door to a secret part of the industry that I’d never been invited into was suddenly opened. So it’s interesting, because I had a very lovely career before any of this was even on my radar.
But that being said, the fact that “The Studio” won awards got us things in the second season that we probably wouldn’t have gotten in the first season. So there is some tangible outcome to some of this stuff. I understand why people get invested in it, and I understand the lure and the draw. I’ve seen people go on this journey and get the exact outcome they were hoping for, and it ultimately gave them none of the things they hoped it would. And I’ve seen people go on the journey and not get the outcome they wanted, and they had a good time and seemed to have good perspective at the end of all of it. It is a fascinating part of our industry to me.
I think especially for smaller things, it is incredibly helpful. It could make or break people’s careers. It could make or break a film. It could change the course of people’s lives. If you’ve already made many billion-dollar movies, winning best picture is a feather in your cap. It’s not going to change the course of your life, per se. But what’s interesting is those people are at these events right next to the people whose lives it will change. To me, that is really interesting to see in real life and really cool. For some people, they’re at the point of their career where awards have very personal stakes, but there are many other people here for whom the awards have real-life stakes. Will they get to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do, or will it not happen the way they hoped?
That is really interesting and scary and cool to see play out. There are those moments where your heart is pounding and you’re like, we’re doing it. This is what we asked for: to put ourselves out there and subject ourselves to reality in terms of how our work is being perceived. It can be very gratifying and incredibly scary and stressful.
Can you tell me something about “The Studio” Season 2? Is there a oner episode again?
We actually try to do much more of that. There are more episodes in a much more condensed timeline. I think there are technically several episodes this season that have no cuts in them, basically, throughout the entire thing. They’re real-time, half-hour moments in time that the episode is chronicling.
It’s a weird time in the industry. Depending on who you ask, the future looks very grim. Others say it’s an evolution and we’re just going through some changes. One of the biggest conversations here at Middleburg was Peter Rice going to Netflix. Someone like him, who’s been such a theatrical guy, making that move feels like a signal: Theatrical’s back! How do you feel about this moment? Do you get nervous, or do you think we’re going to be OK?
It’s a mixture of everything. It is everything at once. I’m very optimistic about some things. The fact that so many people are going to theaters, compared to the last few years, is so encouraging. I think we are finally getting over that hump of the pandemic and the strikes and all that. It seems like things are returning to a time when there are a lot of good movies and people are willing to go see them, and that’s really exciting. From my own personal lens, I can go to the theater on a Tuesday night and it’s packed and it wasn’t like that for a long time. As someone who loves going to the movies, it’s really fun to see. It reminds me of when I was a kid, honestly, a little bit more. And I think other things are terrifying.
10 QUESTIONS WITH SETH ROGEN
Childhood nickname?
“Sethical.” Friends from growing up still call me that when I see them. They don’t even think about it. It just comes out.
Something you loved as a kid but can’t believe you were into when you think about it now?
I get why people like “Magic: The Gathering,” but I spent every penny I had on “Magic: The Gathering” cards. That’s the thing I look back on, and I’m like, I should have bought other stuff.
Go-to karaoke or shower song?
I don’t karaoke as a rule. If karaoke went away altogether, I’d never need to be in a room with some drunk person screaming a song ever again. The rooms are getting smaller and smaller. Now I’m three feet away from this person. It used to be the bar was higher because you were subjecting yourself to a real big room full of people. Now you’re in a little room with just your friends in it, screaming your ass off like an idiot. It’s so loud. I hate it. That said, “All for Love” by Bryan Adams. If you have two other raspy-voiced friends, it’s a really good song.
Alternate title for “The Invite?”
I was going to say “The Apartment.” I would take “The Apartment.”
Secret talent?
I’m pretty flexible. I can almost get my leg behind my head.
Favorite ice cream flavor?
I just like vanilla. I did that movie with Barbra Streisand [”The Guilt Trip”], and she was obsessed with McConnell’s ice cream, which is from Santa Barbara. Every scene we shot, she’s like, “Wouldn’t we be eating ice cream in this scene?” So yes, it’s become McConnell’s.
The one item you can’t live without?
My glasses come to mind. My shoes. Things like that.
What TV show or film in all of history do you wish you were a cast member of?
Maybe it would have been cool to be in “Ghostbusters” or something like that.
Who do you kick out?
Good question. Probably Dan Aykroyd.
Which fictional character do you most relate to or admire?
I always liked Homer Simpson. Not that I relate to or admire him, but I always just liked him.
Your favorite piece of advice, either given or received?
I was told at a very young age to write what only I could write, which meant writing things based on my own experience, things that were happening to me. A stand-up comedian named Darryl Lenox, who’s passed away, unfortunately, told me that and he was really nice to me. I was writing jokes that were observational, like, “What’s the deal with crazy glue?” Those kinds of jokes. I was doing OK. I was maybe 15, maybe 14 and he pulled me aside and said, “Dude, you’re out there trying to get hand jobs and trying to buy beer and trying to sneak into parties and shit. No one else can talk about that. Talk about that. Don’t talk about fucking crazy glue. Any asshole can write that joke.” It was honestly the best creative advice I’ve ever gotten. I try to adhere to it to this day.
Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.
