Seth Rogen has taken his fair share of criticism over the years, and while it may be easy to believe that the comedy actor can just shake off the harsh words of a bad review, Rogen has opened up about the toll it really takes. Discussing his career, and touching on self-doubt and mental health, Rogen let rip at critics who don’t think about the effect a bad review can have on everyone that works on a movie only to see it torn apart. He told the Diary of a CEO podcast:
“I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things. It’s devastating. I know people who have never recovered from it honestly – a year, decades of being hurt by [film reviews]. It’s very personal…It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad, and that’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It f*cking sucks.”
Rogen was asked specifically about the less than spectacular reviews aimed as his 2011 movie, The Green Hornet, and how that compared to some of this other movies such as The Interview, which also saw its critical appraisal being particularly harsh. He continued:
“For Green Hornet, the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad. People hated it. People were taking joy in disliking it a lot. But it opened to like $35 million, which was the biggest opening weekend I’d ever been associated with at that point. It did pretty well. That’s what is nice sometimes. You can grasp for some sense of success at times. [The Interview] felt far more personal. Green Hornet felt like I had fallen victim to a big fancy thing. That was not so such much a creative failure on our parts but a conceptual failure. The Interview, people treated us like we creatively failed and that sucked.”
Seth Rogen Finds Movie-Making A Funny Thing.
While the sting of a harsh critic’s review can last some time, Seth Rogen is aware that there are times it really doesn’t matter because as an actor, or director, or writer, those involved in the film have already usually moved on to their next project. He noted:
“That’s another funny thing about making movies…life goes on. You can be making another movie as your [current] movie is bombing, which is a funny thing. It’s bittersweet. You know things will be ok. You’re already working. If the fear is the movie bombs and you won’t get hired again, well you don’t have to worry about it. But it’s an emotional conundrum at times.”
Seth Rogen has a busy schedule coming up. Having appeared in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, he will voice Donkey Kong in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Bebop in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Hopefully those two performances can avoid the scathing tongues of critics when they are released in April and August respectively.