Please Rewind Talent Wall

Seth Rogen

Seth Rogen has built a career on making disreputable characters feel oddly approachable. His deadpan delivery, rumpled screen presence and willingness to let a joke become painfully awkward have made him a natural fit for comedies about friendship, arrested development and bad decisions. Just as importantly, he has often shaped that material from behind the camera as a writer, producer and director. Born in Vancouver on April 15, 1982, Rogen started performing stand-up as a child. At 13, he and his friend Evan Goldberg began drafting Superbad, drawing on their teenage experiences. By 16, Rogen had placed second in the Vancouver Amateur Comedy Contest and landed the role of Ken Miller in Freaks and Geeks. He left high school, moved with his family to Los Angeles and began working with Judd Apatow, a collaboration that helped establish the direction of his early career. A small role in Donnie Darko offered an early glimpse of Rogen on film, but The 40-Year-Old Virgin brought his dry, casually abrasive humour to a much wider audience. He played Cal, co-produced the movie and improvised his dialogue. That supporting turn led into his breakthrough as the slacker at the centre of Knocked Up, where his comic persona had to carry both crude jokes and the consequences underneath them. Superbad arrived the same year, with Rogen appearing as an irresponsible police officer in the film he co-wrote with Goldberg. The pair also wrote Pineapple Express, in which Rogen plays a process server forced to go on the run with his marijuana dealer, played by James Franco. Together, these films captured what Rogen does particularly well: finding genuine loyalty inside stories powered by panic, immaturity and terrible planning. His career has since expanded across live action, animation, producing and directing. Rogen and Goldberg made their feature directing debut with This Is the End, while Rogen has also taken roles beyond his familiar laid-back mode, including Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs. Whether he is leading a comedy, voicing an animated character or helping build a project behind the scenes, his work retains a recognisable interest in messy people trying, with mixed success, to grow up.