 "I’m kind of shocked there hasn’t been a giant fucking backlash,” says Seth Rogen, laughing at his uncanny run of profane hits, which have pushed pot, porn, and filthy jokes into the multiplex like never before. As the scruffy, puffy face of the vast Judd Apatow comedy syndicate, Rogen has ratcheted up the raunch of mainstream America, from the TV-safe Freaks and Geeks to the R-rated laughs of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, summer’s marijuana-action hit Pineapple Express, and now the wincingly vulgar Zack and Miri Make a Porno, in movie theaters on Halloween.
And instead of facing the obligatory comedown, Rogen—who is 26 but still often mistaken for 46—has become Hollywood’s hottest, most unlikely leading man and chick magnet. Not since the heyday of Woody Allen has a nebbishy actor bedded so many lookers on the screen, a list that includes Katherine Heigl, Amber Heard, and now Porno’s Elizabeth Banks. “Yup,” he admits, scratching his Jew-fro (Rogen’s term for his hairstyle, not ours), “I get to have sex on-screen…with a hot girl. It’s ridiculous.” And then he laughs his signature “har-har-har” so deeply that he sounds like the love child of Kathleen Turner and James Earl Jones.
“If it’s honestly funny, you can get people to see anything,” says Rogen, his slacker figure sunk into a shabby velvet sofa within a cavernous hotel lobby on downtown Manhattan’s Bowery one recent late summer afternoon. The slice of salmon he’s eating may seem uncharacteristic for his tastes, nearly dainty for a guy audiences imagine subsisting entirely on Baconators and the occasional McRib. (He’s trimming down for his upcoming role as the comic book superhero the Green Hornet.) But that he’s chosen to stay at a hotel on the notorious Bowery—albeit a trendy one—is strangely befitting. It was in this neighborhood of men’s lodgings and crusty sailor bars that the true “blue” comics, like Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor, would come to exorcise their most off-color routines in seedy holes-in-the-wall.
Rogen, however, hasn’t had to conceal his basest humor from the masses. Nearly from the get-go, he’s let it all hang out as the filthiest comic actor around for a ticket-buying generation of teenage guys, man-children, and the women attracted to lovable losers—the latest in a proud lineage. But Rogen’s true ingenuity is that he’s found a way to infiltrate his taboo humor into otherwise mainstream teen movies, action flicks, and now romantic comedies.
As he puts it, the alchemy is in “mixing all this dirty shit with all this emotional shit. We never worry about how to mix it up. If you try to handle it like you’re really doing something weird, then it will seem like it. But I don’t think it’s weird at all. I think it’s exactly how life is.”
This will surely be put to the test with Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which, success or failure, may well be remembered as the dirtiest romantic comedy ever made. It is so filthy, in fact, that the film was initially given the box office cyanide pill of an NC-17 rating. Smith, who has become something of a savant at successfully arguing his caseswith the ratings board, persuaded them to overturn the decision by showing them a reel of explicit and scatological outtakes he’d spliced from other films that made the R-rated cut, among them Jackass Number Two and American Pie 2. Zack and Miri remained uncut and rated R.
Quite the feat: in the first 20 minutes alone, Rogen—playing yet another of his archetypal broke-ass horn dogs, this one a Pittsburgh barista named Zack—sticks a handwarmer down his pants (“It’s wedged in my ass! It got wedged in my taint! It’s stuck to my balls!…I think I burned my ball hair off!”), somehow links masturbation to the victims of genocide in Darfur, and explicitly describes his desire to see a Rosie O’Donnell sex tape.
That’s just the warmup, the fluffer as it were, before Zack convinces his hot roommate Miri (Banks) that they should have sex on-camera to pay the bills, followed by a scene that in YouTube circles has already cometo be known as the “Offensive Bodily Fluids Shot.” Even the unfazed Rogen calls it “some seriously nasty shit.” But to him the real gross-out for audiences will be his sex scene with the stunning Banks. Why? Because it’s a shockingly “tender” moment, he says. “I think we shot it in one take, and I can’t watch it—I’ve never watched it,” he says, slapping a hand over his eyes. “It makes me sick. That’s fucking disgusting.”
But Rogen gets exactly why he’s appealing. “People are very tolerant of unattractive guys. They’re not so tolerant of unattractive girls for some reason. I’m not saying it’s right. It’s just the way it is…”
Says Kevin Smith, who wrote the part of Zack for Rogen: “The characters he plays act like they don’t give a fuck. But deep down you always know they do. He’s just so wonderfully sweet. For all us normal-looking guys, he gives us hope that we can get the girl, because he looks like a dude you know and trust. And chicks fucking love him.”
Now, Rogen says, nearly every script he is handed requires that he have on-screen sex with a beautiful actress. (In real life he lives with his long-term girlfriend, TV writer Lauren Miller.) Most famously, in Knocked Up Rogen’s unemployed, pot-smoking couch potato somehow convinces Heigl’s gorgeous, high-powered newscaster to fall in love with him. If some female moviegoers were put off by the film’s unlikely scenario or Hollywood’s double standards about male-female relations, wait until they see Porno. In the film Rogen is not just a skin-flick connoisseur; he’s a first-time porn director. And he doesn’t just get a beautiful woman to have sex with him—he persuades her to have sex with him on-camera, for money.
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