Jason Segel and Seth Rogen, who both emerged from the Judd Apatow comic universe, are now two of the funniest multi-hyphenates in the industry. Segel, with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, co-created “Shrinking,” a dramedy about an unconventional therapist, played by Segel, going through the stages of grief. Rogen, with his longtime writing partner, Evan Goldberg, co-created “The Studio,” and co-directs every episode. He stars as a newly appointed studio executive trying to keep his head above water.
Seth Rogen: The first time we met — 27 years ago — I was 16 or 17 when we shot the pilot of “Freaks and Geeks.” How old were you?
Jason Segel: I was 18 or 19. It’s crazy to think about that. In preparation for this, I was thinking about the first time we bonded. I have a very clear idea of the moment.
Rogen: What was it?
Segel: While we were shooting the pilot, “The Matrix” came out. We didn’t know each other that well. We didn’t know anybody else that well. We were all just meeting each other. And all we knew is that you and I both liked to smoke weed.
Rogen: [The film] came out the day the pilot wrapped, so in my head, the whole pilot was just a march to “The Matrix” being released.
Segel: We rolled giant joints and drove to the movie theater and saw “The Matrix” together. I remember coming out of that movie legitimately feeling like something had changed. It was a very inspiring thing.
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
Rogen: It was like our “Star Wars.”
Segel: You and I started writing harder after that. I think about that period as something you can never get back. We had the naivete of youth. We didn’t really know how to do it.
Rogen: I remember having no fucking clue what I was doing at all. Meeting you — you had thoughts about the craft of acting. You were the first serious actor I ever talked to. All I did was memorize the lines and try to say them in a way that sounds remotely realistic and natural. Then I realized everyone else on the show was creating a whole character.
Segel: But don’t you think acting is all just tricks so that when they say “Action,” you feel comfortable?
Rogen: The longer I act, the less I understand it, honestly. Sometimes I look back at the choices I made, and they’re more surprising at times than things I would do now.
Segel: People always ask, “What would older you say to younger you?” I think the opposite is more important for me at this age. Don’t forget the guys who felt like, “Why can’t I make this movie and end it with a Dracula puppet musical? Why can’t we do this whole movie about trying to get booze?” You know what I mean? There was a naivete that we had: “Who’s going to stop us?”
Rogen: I’ve let pragmatism invade my thinking in many ways. You get too realistic about things, and you’re like, “What’s going to work?” instead of “What sounds fun in the moment?”
Segel: The most strategic decisions I’ve made have been the worst ones.
Do you have a true north — a view of life you’re trying to express?
Rogen: No. Sometimes. I’d say that some things I’ve made are trying to eventually have an idea that they’re trying to get across — something I believe. But I mostly start thinking of an idea as I think of the energy of it. That’s what becomes exciting to me. I never start with one single thing. Where do your ideas come from now?
Segel: I don’t write very often because I don’t love it. I find it to be kind of fraught. I think of an idea, something I’m dealing with in my life, and then I try really hard not to write it. But if it keeps nagging at me, I’m like, “This is something I’ll write.”
Rogen: Me and Evan talk about a Darwinistic approach to our ideas often — the ideas that stick around are the good ideas.
Segel: It’s not that hard to think of ideas. But I get a little indecisive about committing to one. You gave me a piece of advice for a script I’m working on now that really stuck with me. I didn’t feel like I was smart enough to write this thing, and you said, “We’re the age now where you write stuff like that.” That’s the beauty of this thing, starting to realize, “OK, now let’s try to up the degree of difficulty.”
Rogen: Aging is weird in many ways. But acknowledging that your taste has changed and your sensibilities have changed … That was a scary thing for me and Evan to even acknowledge: Oh, we don’t want to make stuff about dumb teenagers anymore.
Segel: Or being afraid of girls.
Rogen: It’s been a decade since Evan and I wrote and directed and produced a thing I was also in. It took us a transition period from our 30s into our 40s where we were working on other stuff the whole time, but it wasn’t our stuff.
Segel: Do you and Evan have the same taste, or is it like a Venn diagram?
Rogen: It’s close enough that we’ve never really had a major conflict over what we want to work on. There’s never been a thing that one of us really wants to make and the other doesn’t want to make at all.
Segel: You really notice, in “The Studio,” this energy that goes through it. It felt to me like a mix: “Birdman” meets “Curb.”
Rogen: That’s exactly what we were going for.
Segel: It’s all of the awkwardness and reality of “Curb,” but set to a rhythm.
Rogen: I wanted it to be fast — that was a word I would use a lot. I thought a lot about: What do I want to do all day? What do I like to do? What I don’t love to do is insert shots and establishing shots. I don’t love doing scenes that feel like they’re serving some storyline that will pay off in a few episodes. I love high-stakes, intense scenes where everyone wants to grab each other and shake each other. As we were writing the show, the first conversations we were having were “How do we infuse every scene so I’m only doing scenes that are really funny?”
Segel: It’s like you only did the scenes that people like.
Rogen: We didn’t cut. Nothing we shot was not in the show. Do you guys improvise a lot?
Segel: When it makes sense. Our show is also this mix of comedy and drama. You know I love talking about acting.
Rogen: Not as much as some.
Segel: All those improv skills that we learned for comedy and got pretty damn good at turned out to really apply to dramatic scenes also.
Rogen: Even more so, I think. Because you aren’t trying to make jokes.
Segel: And you’re not trying to prove you’re clever. With “Shrinking,” the writers are incredible, and they give us a really good treasure map that’s pretty fucking detailed. But then you’re dropped into the treasure map and it’s three-dimensional and you’re like, “Oh, but there’s an interesting little thing over here …”
Rogen: Does the same person direct the whole show?
Segel: No.
Rogen: How’s that? That’s the one thing I’d never really done. “Pam & Tommy” was the first time since “Freaks and Geeks” or “Undeclared” that I’d acted in a television show, and I honestly struggled with having different directors. I was very thrown off by it, having all these people come in, handing off the show from one person to the next.
Segel: I get it. There’s a lot of moving targets, and you’re block shooting for locations, so …
Rogen: … different directors will come in throughout the day.
Segel: That happens occasionally. But we have a really cohesive unit up top with Bill Lawrence. But it’s an interesting thing, you know, because you do all the jobs, but I don’t think anyone knows, until you get into editing, what the show is.
Rogen: Not on our show.
Segel: This is a show about grief, and we wanted to honor that. People are really going through this shit in the world. You also want it to be funny. So it was a lot of turning the dials of how bad you can make him as a therapist.
Rogen: I was explaining it to Lauren, my wife, as we were watching it. She was like, “Is he doing cocaine and sleeping with prostitutes?” I didn’t think this show went there.
Segel: You’ve known me a long time, so you’d probably agree if you were directing me: I was like, “Guys, you can have him do as much bad stuff as you want.”
Rogen: “It’ll be OK.”
Segel: People are going to think, “Oh, I hope he’s OK.”
Rogen: Sympathy.
Segel: Spend the currency.
Rogen: How did you get Harrison Ford?
Segel: We got Harrison Ford because Harrison Ford is the kind of person you make an offer to so that for three days you can say, “We’ve made an offer to Harrison Ford,” and then you’ll pick the real guy.
Rogen: Sounds cool in a restaurant.
Segel: He read it, and he didn’t know anything about me. Brett Goldstein met with him, and they had a really nice meeting, and they sent him “The End of the Tour” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Then, apparently, Bill Lawrence got a text that said, “I’m in. And tell the kid, great dick.”
Rogen: Even if he was out, that would be great. I would take that.
Segel: How about your cameos? Is that the people you’ve amassed throughout your career?
Rogen: No, not at all. I’d say half of them were people I didn’t know at all. We wanted people you haven’t seen us with before. Martin Scorsese, we just sent it to his manager. I’d met Zoë Kravitz once or twice. I met a lot of these people in passing. I’m sure you have at a party.
Segel: I did meet Martin Scorsese once. I met him at the Golden Globes, and we peed next to each other at the urinals. But I had the kids’ one and he had the tall one. So everything about it was just way off. That’s a great memory.
Rogen: He’s a little guy.
Segel: Were you intimidated to direct people like that?
Rogen: It was the worst thing in the whole world. We were shooting the show in such a specific way that I was so nervous it would be creatively rejected.
Segel: I’m so interested to hear that you get nervous.
Rogen: The character is me in many, many ways. And the crux of the character is that he doesn’t want to let down his idols. And that’s one of the biggest things that I’m navigating: Whenever I get anyone to come do a thing we’re doing, I’m so aware of how upset I’ll be if they think it’s bad.
Segel: How do you act while you have to be carrying all this other stuff too?
Rogen: To me, it’s more fun to be directing the scene and in the scene and having written the scene than it is to just be acting the scene. The fact that it’s way harder, I like it.
Segel: It’s a tightrope.
Rogen: “Steve Jobs” was the first time I had done anything where there were these long, elaborate shots and these long walk-and-talks — it has to be exactly right. It was the first time I made a thing where everyone’s really leaning in and everyone’s engaged. And when you got it, everyone’s clapping. That was an energy I wanted to try to create on a day-to-day basis.
Segel: You’re describing my ethos of acting. Repeatability is an important skill when you start doing all the other angles. But the magic part, the part where I’m like, “Oh, fuck, we did it,” is when you catch something.
Production: BAUIE+RAD; Production Design: Francisco Vargas
From Variety US