Seth Rogen recently told GQ magazine that after 11 years he is “pretty at peace” with what went down during the release of 2014’s “The Interview.” The comedy, which Rogen co-wrote and starred in opposite James Franco, followed two Americans tasked by the CIA with assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (played by Randall Park).
Notoriously, “The Interview” played a big role in the Sony hack. Data and emails from Sony employees were leaked online a few days before Thanksgiving 2014, and the hackers demanded the studio withdraw “The Interview’s” theatrical release. The studio also faced threats from North Korea, so it opted to skip a nationwide release and debut the film via online digital rentals and purchases. The group behind the Sony hack was “Guardians of Peace,” which had alleged ties to North Korea.
“It’s not a thing I think about that often anymore, so I guess I’m pretty at peace with it,” Rogen told GQ when the Sony hack and “The Interview” came up. “I still don’t know for sure if I know exactly what happened necessarily and exactly who did what and exactly the exact series of events that kind of transpired. I feel still as though maybe that truth is a little elusive to me at times, and I kind of go back and forth on what it might be.”
When GQ then asked who was responsible for the Sony hack, Rogen replied: “I don’t know. Probably North Korea, but maybe with, in league with people in America, perhaps? Resentful employees from the Sony corporation is something that is a prevailing theory that’s been out there as well. So I don’t know. I feel as though North Korea definitely had something to do with it, but I don’t know if American people also had something to do with it.”
Rogen appeared on the “Hawk vs. Wolf” podcast in 2023 and admitted his life was “really bad and really catastrophic” in 2014 when all the Sony hack stuff was going down.
“People we knew were getting fired from it. The head of the studio [Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal] was essentially fired from it,” Rogen said. “It really caused seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time, and I think how business was done in some ways… [It also] re-calibrated what I think is controversial. After that, I was like, now I know what it’s like. Unless the president is giving news conferences about it, that’s controversy. If someone is getting mad about it on social media, that’s not controversy. Having like the U.N. have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy.”
If there’s anything Rogen regrets about “The Interview,” it’s more about the movie itself and not the chaos that ensued around it. He told GQ the movie “could have used maybe another set comedy piece in the second half of the second act that could have bolstered the comedy in some ways.”
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“It’s so funny because that’s my perspective on it,” Rogen added. “With everything that went wrong with this movie, I’m like, ‘We could have used another set piece around page 70.’ To me, that’s what I view as something that if I could go back, I would do differently with the movie. I just feel like I have a better understanding now of what a comedy film needs in order to really delight an audience in the way that I want to.”
Head over to GQ’s website to read Rogen’s profile in its entirety.
From Variety US