Seth Rogen How Hollywood's goofy stoner went from wisecracks to serious satire

It's a volte-face from dope-smoking slacker to movie exec in new series The Studio. He's still smoking joints, though.

- By Guy Lodge

In Seth Rogen's new satirical series, The Studio, Rogen plays the newly appointed head of a major Hollywood production company - and there was a time when that alone would have been the joke.

The goofy, schlubby, pre-eminent manchild of mainstream comedy, handed the role of a powerful industry suit - the fish-out-of-water jokes would have written themselves. But Matt Remick, Rogen's character in The Studio, isn't a manchild but a man: a pretty regular middle-aged one, trying to do good, honest work in a sour, cynical business.

It's the industry around Matt, rather, that appears stuck in a state of arrested development, as he's handed one lazy, IP-milking movie pitch after another (including a Kool-Aid origin story that sounds almost too plausible to be parodic) while trying to hold on to his soul.

Back in the mid-2000s, Rogen broke through in Hollywood as the very picture of wise-cracking, dope-smoking slackerdom; nearly 20 years later, the Canadian actor and filmmaker is perilously close to playing the straight man. Offscreen, too, Rogen has shaped up and grown up, even if he remains the most enthusiastic marijuana advocate in showbiz. The Studio, which he devised and directed with his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg, may be the crispest embodiment yet of Rogen's more mature persona, but it's not an abrupt about-face: now 42, the star has been quietly tweaking his public and professional image over the years, correcting past missteps and modelling a progressive attitude where many straight white dudebro comics have turned bitter or defensive against the perceived onset of new, "woke" industry standards.

"The complaint that comedy's harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint," Rogen said in an Esquire interview earlier this year.