Revenge of the Seth

A look inside the onscreen persona of one of Hollywood's most unlikely leading men: Seth Rogen.

Rogen and Heigl’s characters meet in a club; as the scene begins, he’s hanging with his boys, she with her sister. As scripted, the dudes’ interaction was supposed to touch on the fact that Jack Black’s movie stardom had made it easier for a guy who looked like Rogen to get laid. But on the set, improvisation completely changed the topic, and in the finished film, the discussion centers around Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” “That movie was Eric Bana kicking fucking ass!” Ben raves. “In every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed. ‘Munich’ flips it on its ear – we’re capping motherfuckers!” After a toast to Eric Bana and ass-kicking Jews the matter is dropped for the rest of the film. But the conversation was proved a portentous one: not only does Bana appear alongside Rogen in “Funny People,” but more and more of Rogen’s post-”Knocked Up” roles (including several Rogen wrote himself) have him assuming the unlikely role of the ass-kicking Jew.

Take, for example, last summer’s “Pineapple Express.” Once again, Rogen plays the pothead slob, a process server named Dale Denton. But witnessing a murder forces Rogen’s character through another forced maturation: though Rogen stated in interviews that he doesn’t consider the film an anti-pot pot movie, at a key moment, Dale realizes that he’s not very functional when he’s high, which, as he notes, “is all the time!” After that, Dale doesn’t smoke in the movie again and, slowly but surely, Dale transforms into an action stud, getting into fistfights and shootouts and even outrunning an explosion. Eric Bana would be proud.

Earlier this year, Rogen appeared in Jody Hill’s “Observe and Report” as a gun-and-grudge-toting mall cop desperate for respect. There the character’s own inherent contradictions — as a guy both sweetly pathetic and creepily pathological — were eclipsed by the movie’s, with seemingly comedic scenes punctuated by random acts of senseless, scary violence. In “Pineapple Express,” Rogen’s big fight was with just one guy; in “Observe and Report” he takes down an entire gang of thugs with a night stick (later he holds his own against a whole squad of police officers). Rogen and Hill both love reconciling seemingly incompatible elements onscreen, and playing with the tension that comes from trying to mix conflicting impulses (like, say, playing a date rape for laughs).

After “Funny People,” Rogen will get to flex his action muscles more than ever, in the big-screen version of “The Green Hornet.” In his “Screen Test” for the New York Times, Rogen described his vision for the project. “He’s really the only superhero whose sidekick is way more famous than he is. It’s really a relationship story — about people working out their professional relationship with one another.” Some scoffed at a “comedian” getting cast in the role, but Rogen’s persona, an interlocking web of insecurity and resourcefulness, fits perfectly with a potential about superhero inadequacy and one-upsmanship.

In that “Freaks and Geeks” audition, Rogen talks about what he wants to be when he grows up. He says that he’d like to be a farmer who grows weed on the sly, hiding his stash from the police and never getting caught. If we’d told that kid on the tape about all of this, what do you think he would say?

[Additional photo: "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Universal, 2005]

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