It’s been a year and a half since stoner comedy hero Seth Rogen inadvertently had a hand in the biggest hack-slash-international incident in Hollywood history, but life didn’t seem too shabby as the Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising star sat in the sunshine along the idyllic suburban sprawl known to most of America as Wisteria Lane.
Rogen, 34, didn’t film Neighbors 2 here on the Universal back lot; director Nicholas Stoller shot the sequel to the $270 million-grossing 2014 hit over in rebate-friendly Georgia. Still, there’s something breezily appropriate in seeing Rogen bask in the peaceful Tinseltown street that’s played safe, homey haven to all-American families in everything from Leave it to Beaver to The Munsters to Nelly’s “Dilemma” music video.
“I mean, in a weird way it was somewhat freeing because it kind of showed you the most extreme case scenario that it suddenly could possibly be taken to,” Rogen said of the Sony hack, which did irreparable damage to the studio when hackers stole a reported 100 terabytes of sensitive data and proceeded to release embarrassing internal emails and employee information online.
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Their alleged motive: Outrage over the North Korea-skewering satire The Interview, in which Rogen and James Franco assassinate Kim Jong-Un. “And everyone came out okay!” Rogen added with a smile, birds chirping loudly in the trees above. “Well, mostly. Pretty much!”
Yes and no. The Sony hack is but a faint memory today, long enough removed from the breathless news cycle it dominated just two Christmases ago. Thousands of Sony staff had their personal data compromised, jobs were lost, any sense of security anyone working in Hollywood previously had was gone overnight, and the film was pushed and rejiggered as Sony bowed to the hackers’ intimidations, taking a huge box office hit when it cancelled a planned theatrical release.
Sony chief Amy Pascal weathered the worst of the cyber nightmare and eventually resigned her post. Even President Obama chimed in as the attack took on geopolitical implications, promising a response on behalf of the United States government while chiding Sony brass. “I think they made a mistake,” POTUS said, reprimanding Sony and pointing the finger at North Korea in one fell swoop.
After countless expert analyses and reports on the real culprits behind the hack, Rogen says he’s still not quite sure if North Korea did it. “I don’t know!” he said, his eyebrows crinkling. “I heard very recently they released a thing that kind of definitely said it was, but… I still don’t know, honestly. I don’t know. It just seems so crazy. But I hear there are books being made about it and documentaries being filmed about it, so maybe one day I’ll read one of those books and it’ll have some insight that I don’t currently have.”
Rogen laughs a little more easily now at the whole surreal affair, which he says didn’t scare him and collaborator Evan Goldberg away from tackling risqué comedy targets. He doesn’t worry too much about cyber spies—even if he probably should. “I just assume that there’s a million people living inside my computer at all times from this point, which is OK,” he chuckled. “They’re probably going to see me jack off a lot.”
The writer-producer-star reprises his role as hapless new father and husband Mac Radner in Neighbors 2, the first film Rogen also co-wrote since The Interview. In it, Mac and wife Kelly (Rose Byrne) have just sold their house, but find the sale in jeopardy when a trio of 18-year-old girls move in next door, hell-bent on forming the first sorority that can party. They enlist the help of former Delta Psi Beta icon Teddy Sanders (Zac Efron), who’s finding that his own friends have grown up and moved into responsible adulthood and left him behind, trapped without purpose reliving his collegiate glory days.
Like all great film sequels, Neighbors 2 takes the groundwork laid in the first film and builds on it in new and intriguing ways. Where the first film explored the hypermacho world of fraternities, the sequel adds Chloe Grace Moretz to spearhead a fresh young feminist take on the realities of college life. Namely, that young women seeking sisterhood and acceptance in the Greek world do not share the same rights to party as their frat bro brethren.
“There were a lot of ideas that made us excited as we were working on the script, but re-contextualizing some of the ideas that we explore in the first movie through the lens of women, rather than men, became an interesting idea,” said Rogen. Along with Goldberg, Stoller, Brendan O’Brien, and Andrew J. Cohen, Rogen penned the script, tapping writers Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci to add a female perspective.
As a result Neighbors 2 boasts a subtle streak of self-reflexive social commentary on everything from gender politics to race relations to Men’s Rights to Black Lives Matter. In a brief but scene-stealing appearance, Hannibal Buress returns as Officer Watkins, joined by Jerrod Carmichael’s Garf, who’s now also become a police officer.
“The theme of social justice in general became a very funny theme to have throughout the movie, and gave us the opportunity to make a lot of jokes about things that we kind of both thought about and cared about,” smiled Rogen. “It seemed like a waste to have Jerrod and Hannibal as two black cops and not make some comment on [Black Lives Matter] in some way, shape, or form!”
“And Jerrod obviously had a lot of thoughts on things he could be saying about it. But again, it all fit into this theme—it became this social commentary on social justice and political correctness… and different characters in the movie fall on very different sides of that coin,” continued Rogen. “To me, the men’s rights joke always makes me laugh.”
To Rogen’s credit, he spends a lot of Neighbors 2 letting his co-stars shine. Efron in particular invokes surprising depth as Teddy, who learns from his new sorority charges that bros should not necessarily come before hos—and what’s more, that this sort of misogynist dudebro thinking is just plain wrong. Teddy’s entire world is turned upside down, in fact, when his best friend and roommate Pete (Dave Franco) announces his own major lifestyle change.
“We just liked the idea that everyone in Zac’s life has gone on to bigger and better things—except him,” Rogen laughed. “I brought one of my friends from Vancouver to one of the first screenings of the movie and he was like, ‘I can’t believe that you made me feel bad for Zac Efron, and there’s no reason I should ever feel sympathy for him.’”
Neighbors 2 is also poised to add another notch to Rogen and Goldberg’s belts as producers, and they’ve got more coming. Their hotly anticipated comic book series adaptation Preacher debuts on AMC this weekend, and Rogen’s already hoping for a second season renewal.
“I hope people enjoy it,” he said, grinning. “We’re just trying to do things that are exciting to us, really. That’s our only rule—we should try to make the kind of things that we would be excited to consume as people who consume a lot. So that’s really it! What’s exciting about Preacher is that it’s a little more dramatic, even though it’s comedic at times. That was fun to do, just to see if we could do it. And we like things that aren’t only comedic.”
Both Preacher and the duo’s R-rated film Sausage Party got a major bump last March at SXSW, where audiences loved the naughty animated adventure about sentient food revolting against their human oppressors.
“Sausage Party is something we’ve been working on for a really, really long time and it’s exciting that it’s finally coming together and will be shown to the world,” he said. “It’s super crazy. It’s fun to sit in a theater with an audience and you can tell they were thinking, ‘HOW were they allowed to do this??’ I think more than any other movie we’ve made, Sausage Party is filled with moments where you feel people looking around at each other in the theater going, ‘Are you SEEING this?!’”
It’s the kind of unexpected animation one expects some unwitting substitute teacher will play for a classroom of children a few years from now, a notion that delights Rogen. “I very much hope that happens,” he laughs.
Rogen, a Hillary Clinton backer, once famously Tweeted a brief but colorful message to GOP hopeful Ben Carson that simply read, “Fuck you @RealBenCarson.” Nowadays, he says, he’s given up on trying to argue politics.
“I listened to a thing on NPR that basically explained that it’s impossible to change people’s minds, and that in order to actually change someone’s mind they have to spend like half an hour in person with someone who is personally affected by whatever the specific issue is that they have an issue with,” he said. “And since I read that, I’ve thought, I can never change people’s minds!”
“And so I’ve kind of stopped talking about politics because I’m kind of wasting my breath. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind. I’m either going to reaffirm people’s beliefs who already believe something or I’m going to antagonize people who disagree with me. So I just kind of quietly sit and watch.”
Maybe moviegoers can gauge Rogen’s faith in the future in his choice of projects. In July he’ll start filming his next comedy The Something, also produced by his and Goldberg’s Point Grey Productions. “It’s a space movie with me and Zach Galifianakis and Bill Hader,” he said. “It’s about stupid people in space. Our idea is that now they only send smart people into space, but in probably 50 or 60 years we’ll start sending very regular, stupid people into space.”
