The Superbaddest: Bill Hader on Seth Rogen
When you’re an actor, things can get hot and exciting for a second, and then it cools off. Maybe, something else happens down the line, and it gets a little crazy for a while, and it cools off again. And then you have a guy like Seth Rogen, who just seems to have sustained this heat for a long while. It’s a never-ending hot thing with him Since Knocked Up, it’s just hasn’t let up.
I met Seth on the set of You, Me and Dupree — I’d just been cast in SNL, and this was the first movie I’d had a part in. I just started hanging out and bullshitting with him and Evan Goldberg, his best friend; we talked about movies and comic books, and we were just making each other laugh a lot. Like a lot of folks, I had been a fan of Freaks and Geeks, and I remember watching him on that show and thinking, “This guy is not self-conscious at all.” Seth is the kind of star where you watch him onscreen and think, “I’d actually like to hang out with that guy. And maybe smoke a lot of pot with him.”
The thing is, I don’t even smoke pot, and I still want to hang out with Seth. I’m not sure I can give him a bigger compliment than that. When I have smoked pot with him, I feel weird and get tired really quick. He once told me, “Smoking pot with you is like smoking pot with my dad.” When I hosted Saturday Night Live recently, he came backstage to see me before the show, and there were a number of folks who were like, “Oh man, Seth Rogen is here…I’m going to go get high with him!” I kept telling them, “Guys, just leave him alone…” But that’s how people think of him. You’re kind of awestruck yet you still want to burn a doob with him.
I found out I got the part in Superbad when I met Judd Apatow for the first time; he said, “Hey, so Seth and Evan wrote this movie, and you’re going to play a cop in it.” I figured it was going to be one scene where I play a cop in the background, or I show up and say two lines so someone gets from Point A to Point B. So I called Seth and he goes “Congratulations, you’re in!” I said, “Yeah, so I guess I’m a cop. Cool.” And he just said, “No, you and I are cops, we’re in, like, most of the movie.” That was when I realized, oh, it’s legitimate! And this all came from just hanging out with him on the You, Me and Dupree set. He just operates by instinct.
Which isn’t to say he’s just some guy who shows up, cracks a few jokes and then goes home. The guy works really fucking hard. A lot of people romanticize the process of making movies: “I’m going to wake up every morning and work on my script, I’m going to carry my notebook around and I shall be inspired!” Seth and Evan were the first people I’d met who just took a real no-bullshit attitude about it. It was very “Yeah, writing…this is work. You have to put the fucking hours in.”
You’re kind of awestruck yet you still want to burn a doob with him.
The thing about comedy is, it’s all about trying to bottle the feeling you get when you’re with your friends fucking around. There’s a lot “if you structure comedy, you’ll kill it” mindsets out there. Rogen is having none of that. He also has no interest in trying to outmaneuver people when it comes to making movies. It’s simply: “These are the types of movies I like. Here’s what I want to do. This is my best friend, Evan; he’ll be writing with me. These are some more funny people I know. We’re going to go make something now.” The Venn Diagram between what he finds funny and what a lot of other people find funny just happens to be huge, so he’s able to attract a large audience and make popular stuff.