Seth Rogen and James Franco spent years as friends and close collaborators on the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks and movies like Pineapple Express, This Is The End, The Disaster Artist and The Interview.
But after Franco was hit with numerous allegations of sexual misconduct in 2018, Rogen has said he has no plans to work with him again. And his approach hasn’t changed.
Still Rogen was asked about his relationship with Franco in a recent interview with The New York Times, and he indicated the situation is complicated.
“I honestly think the nuance of it is too personal for me to get into right now,” Rogen said. “It is a very personal thing. There’s the public-facing side of it, which I’ve spoken about, and I have the same stance publicly that I’ve had, and I think the proof is in the pudding — I have not worked with him in years. But the personal side of it is just so nuanced, and it involves people that I don’t know if I should be dragging into this. I don’t know what I would benefit from getting deeply into it. Nothing has changed since the last time I talked about all this, and I haven’t worked with him in a really long time and I have no plans to.”
As for whether he’s in touch with Franco, Rogen said that he hasn’t talked to him “in a long time.”
In 2021, Rogen told the U.K. Times that he doesn’t plan to work with Franco again despite saying he would in 2018 after the accusations against Franco first emerged.
“I … look back to that interview in 2018 where I comment that I would keep working with James, and the truth is that I have not and I do not plan to right now,” he told the Sunday Times Magazine.
Still he conceded the allegations against Franco have affected their friendship, but he couldn’t say if that meant they were no longer friends.
“I don’t know if I can define that right now during this interview,” he said. “I can say it, um, you know, it has changed many things in our relationship and our dynamic.”
Elsewhere in his interview with the NY Times, Rogen opened up about the “incredibly sad” experience of losing his Studio co-star Catherine O’Hara, who died earlier this year from a pulmonary embolism after a brief battle with rectal cancer.
“We started to hear she was sick,” he said. “As we were nearing the second season, we would talk to her and she really wanted to come back. Honestly, in the back of our heads we were like, We hope she can, but we don’t know if she’ll be able to. So it is this very sad thing where, creatively, in the back of your mind, you’re making contingency plans but you don’t want to think about it. But your brain is kind of telling you one thing and you’re trying not to believe it.”
He recalls learning of her death the first week of filming season two of The Studio.
“It was really, really sad. We were all together, the whole crew, and everyone loved her very much,” he says. “We didn’t know what to do, and we just kept shooting. I think the idea of making each other laugh and being together felt preferable to anything else we could have done that day.”
Rogen told the U.K. Times in April that he and The Studio team are “acknowledging” her death with co-creator Evan Goldberg calling dealing with her absence an “unbelievable challenge.”
Teasing season two to the NY Times, Rogen said it was “far more ambitious than the first season.”
“There have been many times I’ve been on set this season and been truly amazed — in a way that has offered me a lot of gratification and pride — in what we’ve been able to pull off and the people we’ve been able to talk into doing the show,” he says. “I’ve watched the episodes, and I really feel as though I’m pushing myself more and more creatively. I’m in the middle of it right now, but I’m excited and nervous for people to see it. We tried to up our game, and there are moments where I really feel like we are doing something that I’m very proud of.”
One thing, though, that viewers shouldn’t expect see on The Studio, though, is romance, Rogen revealed.
“Truthfully I haven’t made a romantic thing in a long time. It’s not that creatively interesting to me to show two people falling in love. When we were first coming up, every movie had a romantic story line or, like, conflict between the main couple that had to be resolved,” he said. “We’re making “The Studio” now, which has no romantic story lines on the show.”
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