“I’ve known Stormy Daniels a long time, and I’ll be honest, she may have mentioned some of this stuff around 10 years ago,” Seth Rogen told Ellen DeGeneres on Monday.
As Rogen explained to DeGeneres, he has shared the screen twice with Daniels, the adult film actress who Donald Trump allegedly paid $130,000 to stay silent about an affair just days before the 2016 election. The affair, which Daniels recently discussed in great detail on 60 Minutes, is said to have occurred in 2006, one year after her cameo in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and one year before she popped up again in Knocked Up.
“At the time, when you asked a porn star who they’ve been sleeping with and the answer is Donald Trump, it was like the least surprising thing that she could have said,” Rogen added, cracking himself up. “So yeah, she had mentioned it actually.”
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As Trump inched closer to the presidency in 2016, Rogen said, “It became clear that nobody cared about anything he did and so it didn’t really occur to me even that it would come out or that anyone would care about it.” That is also, presumably, why he didn’t feel the need to make it public on her behalf.
“I haven’t seen Stormy in years,” Rogen said later. “But she’s clearly done well with herself.” As for why she appeared in those two Judd Apatow-directed films, he explained that they decided it was better to hire porn stars to play strippers than force regular actresses to strip on screen. “For Stormy, that was the easiest thing she did all week,” he joked.
In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Apatow described Daniels as “very smart and really strong and funny, to the point where we kept asking her to do silly things in our movies.” He added, “What’s really troubling about [Trump] is it’s somebody who does what he wants to do and thinks he can throw money at people and make them disappear.”
