“My career is not one steeped with awards attention,” notes Seth Rogen, chuckling in his inimitable way, on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “I’ve accepted that, and that’s become fine with me. So it is nice and sort of novel that, after working for this long, something new and exciting can happen.”
The Canadian actor, writer, producer and director is referring to the TV Academy’s tremendous embrace of the The Studio, the Apple TV+ comedy series about a present-day Hollywood studio chief that he co-created, co-wrote, co-directed and stars in. Last month, the show received 23 Emmy nominations — breaking Ted Lasso’s record for most noms for a rookie comedy and tying the second season of The Bear’s record for most noms for any season of a comedy — including acting, writing, producing and directing noms for Rogen himself. He emphasizes, “We’re very thrilled about it.”
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Rogen, 43, has been described by The Washington Post as “a generational comedic voice,” by The Guardian as “the most successful comic leading man of his generation” and by The New York Times as someone whose “fingerprints” — along with those of his longtime creative partner, Evan Goldberg — “have been among the most visible on American film comedy for almost 20 years.”
His work for the big screen — which includes 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, 2007’s Knocked Up and Superbad, 2008’s Pineapple Express, 2013’s This Is the End, 2014’s The Interview and Neighbors and 2016’s Sausage Party — has collectively grossed nearly $10 billion worldwide. And yet it was not until earlier this year, when he returned to the small screen — from which he emerged decades ago on the short-lived cult classic Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) — that he found widespread critical appreciation.
On The Studio, Rogen plays Matt Remick, a longtime Hollywood exec who is named the head of a major studio, a job that he has long dreamed of but that he quickly discovers is not all that it’s cracked up to be. The Associated Press has said it “may be the definitive portrait of contemporary Hollywood,” while the New York Times described it as “funnier than most anything on TV now.”
Over the course of a conversation at the Los Angeles offices of Point Grey Pictures, Rogen and Goldberg’s production company, Rogen reflected on he wound up in Hollywood as a teenager, and with Judd Apatow as his mentor; the backstories of the crude but heartfelt and largely improvised film comedies that made him a star; his occasional forays into drama, including in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans; how some of his most infamous misadventures in Hollywood — such as the flop of his superhero movie The Green Hornet and North Korea’s hacking of Sony Pictures in response to his film The Interview — informed The Studio; plus more.
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