Seth Rogen’s Wonder Years

Seth Rogen combs the comic-book store like he’s on a mission. He starts at one end of Golden Apple in Hollywood and me­thodically works his way down the aisles, scanning the shelves for The Authority and other favorites. The clerks give Rogen a “what’s up, dude” nod.They recognize him —— not because his shaggy curls and cherubic face have been plastered on movie billboards across America all summer, but be­cause Rogen is a regular. He’s been coming to Golden Apple on a weekly basis since he was a teenager.

Suddenly, Rogen sees something in a glass case that excites him: a large, detailed figurine of Sabretooth and Wolverine battling it out on an iceberg. Sure, it’s $190, but check out those blood­stains. “Hell, yeah,” says the clerk, as he wraps it up for Rogen.

After stuffing the figurine and some comic books into the trunk of his dust-encrusted sedan, Rogen heads across the street for lunch. Sitting under the fluorescent lights of the Hot Wings Cafe, Rogen looks exactly like the kind of schlubby slacker he played in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (“Hey, I just remembered I bought that Wolverine figurine,” he says halfway through a large basket of wings. “I’m really psyched about it – it just popped into my head.”) At twenty-five, Rogen has avoided the pitfalls of panty-chasing celebrity, choos­ing instead to pursue a far more deviant agenda: reshaping young Hollywood in his own rounded, writerly, geeky image. Surrounded by a band of like-minded outsiders, Rogen has written, produced or starred in some of the most talked-about comedies in recent box-office history, including this summer’s Knocked Up and Superbad. His life is unchanged by success – mostly because he spends his time at home, smoking weed and playing video games. The whole fame thing, he says, takes up about four min­utes of his day. “I’m not, like, Matthew McConaughey mellow,” he says, “but I’m mellow.”

As if on cue, a pack of young Korean dudes at the table next to Rogen seize an opening and ask him to pose for a photo with them. “Sure, sure,” he says. He smiles as broadly as the fans and flashes a meaningless gang sign over his chest for the camera.

“See?” he says as we walk out back into the sunshine. “Four minutes.”

That may be about to change, following the release this month of Superbad. It’s not just that the movie traces the adventures of three high school boys – Seth, Evan and Fogell – as they spend a hellish night trying to buy alcohol and get laid. It’s that Rogen sticks so close onscreen to what he lives, there are times that he seems more like the star of his own reality-TV show than one of Hollywood’s most successful new actors and writers. A few key factors about Superbad point to the art-imitating-life-imitating-art agenda that Rogen is pursuing: (1) He co-wrote the movie’s screenplay when he was a fat, angry, funny teenager, (2) The main character of the movie is a fat, angry, funny teenager named Seth. And (3) said role is played by one of Rogen’s best friends, the fattish, an-gry-ish and extremely funny Jonah Hill, who offscreen lives in Rogen’s old apartment.

Rogen began writing the movie with his best friend, Evan Goldberg, back in 1995, when they were a couple of thirteen-year-olds growing up in Vancouver. Goldberg liked to write short stories, and Rogen – well, Rogen was a loud kid whose hair alternated between bright blue and dreadlocks. “He was a loud fucking dude,” says Gold­berg, who met Rogen in bar mitsvah class. “I’m pretty much sure I called him ‘the loud dude’ in my head.”

Then one day, just like that, they decide to write a movie. “There was some movie we watched on TV and it was just terrible,” Goldberg recalls. “We were like, ‘We could do better than this —— let’s go upstairs.'”

So they do. They go up to the family computer, in the pink bedroom of Evan’s little sister. Evan types, Seth sits next to him. It will be a high-school movie, they decide, but way better than the crap they watch on TV. It will be real, and awkward, and full of the fear that seems omnipresent at school. “There was a guy who wanted to stab us because he thought we’d ripped him off,” Goldberg says. “There were always these random beefs, people saying ‘fuck you’ to each other all the time.”

No, this movie —— their movie —— will be about what really matters in high school: “It was always about two guys trying to get alcohol for girls,” says Rogen. “We actually didn’t do any research. Horniness is a timeless feeling.”

So Goldberg sits there and types out the jokes that he and Rogen come up with. “The first scene we wrote took place in a Spanish class, with Seth fantasizing about the teacher,” Goldberg says. “My mom kept hearing me laughing hysterically and wanted to know what we were doing.” They work on the script throughout high school, for three years, in between rugby practice and video games and spending time with their other friend, Sammy Fogell. And they keep working on it after Rogen’s mom starts driving him to comedy clubs, where he mines his grandparents and his bar mitsvah for material.

It was while he was still in high school that Rogen went to audition for Judd Apatow, himself a Hollywood wunderkind who was casting for his new show about kids in high school. “When I first saw Seth, he was read­ing for Freaks and Geeks,” Apatow says, “and he read every line in such a pissed-off manner that no sixteen-year-old should have. It really cracked us up. Why he’s funny, I don’t know. You ask him and he’ll tell you some­thing about having Rasta dreadlocks in junior high.”