Seth Rogen Almost Smoked Weed With Himself in ‘An American Pickle’

Seth Rogen didn’t have a problem tapping into his dramatic side for An American Pickle, which premiered on HBO Max on Thursday. He did, however, find it slightly more difficult to do so while acting with an earpiece and a tennis ball.

An American Pickle—directed by Brandon Trost, written by Simon Rich, and produced by Rogen and Evan Goldberg—is about a Jewish immigrant who falls into a vat of pickle brine in 1919 in Brooklyn and wakes up 100 years later to a whole new world. Rogen plays both that immigrant, Herschel Greenbaum, and his own great-grandson, Ben Greenbaum. Rogen didn’t want to don a fake beard, so he filmed the entirety of Herschel’s side of the movie first, shaved, and then went back and read Ben’s lines. This time, he had to respond to his own pre-recorded take.

“At times, it was incredibly frustrating,” Rogen admitted in a short phone interview with Decider on Thursday (August 6) afternoon.

Though the plot may sound like a goofy set-up, An American Pickle is a surprisingly serious comedy, especially for Rogen and Goldberg. Themes include death, heritage, grief, religion, and prayer. And, for the first time in nearly a decade for the producing duo, the movie is rated PG-13, rather than R. The 38-year-old star spoke to Decider about that shift, acting with himself, and the weed-smoking scene in An American Pickle that got cut.

DECIDER: Congratulations on the movie, I really loved it. Are you watching people’s reactions roll in on Twitter today?

SETH ROGEN: [Laughs] I do not have that type of constitution, necessarily. No. I peek in.

That’s probably healthier.

Yeah, exactly.

I read that you filmed all of Herschel’s parts first, and then filmed all of Ben’s parts with an earpiece. How did you approach that challenge as an actor?

It was a challenge. The actual execution of playing two different roles was not incredibly scary to me. As an actor, you play a lot of different characters. Even though I’m not known as someone who plays vastly different characters, in my head, I do. But the logistical and technical side of executing it was very daunting. At times, it was incredibly frustrating. It had to be so precise and so specific, but also have the appearance of being completely effortless and off-the-cuff. Which it was anything but. I would get frustrated at myself. I would watch [it back] and see that you can tell I’m waiting for this cue. Or my eye line is a little funny. Or I’m being a little rigid with my physicality because I’m not with another person. I was hard on myself, as far as really wanting it to come across as naturalistic as possible. The actual technical side was pretty difficult. And the most annoying thing is, if we do our job well, it will seem really easy. [Laughs.]

Would you ever take an acting role that relied that heavily on the technical side again, having done it?

Yeah, for sure, if it was called on. I don’t plan on endeavoring in a Klump-esque career path from this point on [the fictional family played by Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor], but I did enjoy the technical side of it. And honestly, I do enjoy the technical side of filmmaking. I enjoy precise filmmaking. Probably because I was brought up in such an imprecise environment when it came to certain elements of filmmaking. It’s fun for me to do that type of thing.

Maybe we’ll see you de-aged in The Irishman 2.

Exactly. [Laughs.]

The screenwriter, Simon Rich, based the original short story on himself and his own great-grandfather. How did you work your own family history into playing Ben?

Our family histories are pretty similar, honestly. It was more, I think, the themes of grief and how we abandon our religion. How we might be abandoning things that are helpful to us in moving on. Becoming happy, functional people. Those were kind of the themes that I tried to bolster.

An American Pickle feels especially emotional and dramatic compared to the R-rated stoner comedies that you and Evan Goldberg are known for. I felt the same way about Long Shot—definitely R-rated, but it felt like a slightly new direction for you. Is this an intentional shift?

No, I wouldn’t say it’s intentional. It’s interesting, we’re also making things like Good Boys and Blockers. By nature, I star and am in a lot of our movies, so therefore, they are about people that are our age. As I get older, the star of our movies is getting older. Or some of them, at least. And that’s why it is nice to be able to make things like Good Boys, where I’m not in them and they don’t have to serve my age group in any way, shape, or form, necessarily. But just as I get older, and we all get older, I think by nature, we try to be true to that. Our sensibilities change a little bit. What we want out of a movie changes and develops. As we deepen our own emotional wells, I think we look for our films to hopefully do similar things as well. Some of them, at least. Not all of them. But some of them.

Was there any temptation to include a scene in An American Pickle where Ben introduces his great-grandfather to recreational drugs?

[Laughs] There actually was a scene where they smoke weed together. And it honestly seemed like we just didn’t need it. We never shot it. It was in the script. But it just seemed like at this point, you know, do people need this?

Interesting! Was An American Pickle originally an R-rated comedy then?

It kind of was an R-rated movie until we started filming it. Not to say there was anything in it at any point that was like—there were like, maybe little jokes here and there that technically were R-rated. As we were filming it, we were like, “I don’t think this movie wants to be R-rated.” And that is how we approach it. Some movies want to be R-rated, and some movies don’t. If you’re making Sausage Party, it wants to be R-rated. But this movie, it kind of has this fairy tale vibe to it a little bit. To that end, our more subversive, edgy jokes didn’t feel like they fit in it, necessarily.

There are some nods to Trump in the movie, but Herschel never flat out asks who the president is, and Ben doesn’t try to catch him up on American politics. Was that left out on purpose? 

Yeah. Some of our movies we are very firmly trying to anchor in the real world that the audiences live in. Other movies, not as much. This was a movie that I think does not 100 percent take place in the real world. To that end, dating it too specifically was not serving its interest necessarily. We felt like maybe it wanted to feel a little more timeless than like: this is the time that it’s existing in.

Last question: We got an update on Pineapple Express 2 recently, but is there an update on a third Neighbors film?

I don’t think the second film made nearly enough money to warrant a third Neighbors film. [Laughs.]

So sad.

It’s okay. We’ll make other movies!

Watch An American Pickle on HBO Max