Word: rogen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Life, as I see it, is R-rated," Rogen says. Then he giggles. It's so R-rated that Knocked Up--despite scenes depicting childbirth from health-class angles--is a muted version of Rogen's shtick. "We said, 'The dude gets married? That's kind of lame,'" says writing partner Goldberg. "We write stuff where the universe ends and Martians land." But Rogen says he has learned from Apatow to focus on story and emotional honesty over aliens and punch lines. "Apatow kept saying, 'Less semen. More emotion,'" says Rogen...
More than anyone else in comedy since vaudeville died, Rogen is a protégé. Sure, he had been writing scripts with Goldberg after school, and his mom drove him to stand-up gigs at Yuk Yuk's (his retort to hecklers: "I'm 13. In 30 years, I'll be 43. You'll be dead"). He had even been paid by a mohel to write jokes. But ever since he dropped out of high school, Rogen has studied exclusively under Apatow...
After casting him in a small role in Freaks, Apatow started to think about keeping Rogen around when he improvised a sweet, funny scene in which his character wonders if he's gay after finding out his girlfriend was born a hermaphrodite. When Freaks ended after one season, Apatow tried to cast Rogen as the lead of Undeclared, a sitcom about college kids. The network, however, didn't think Rogen looked like a leading actor. "He was already approved to be in the cast, and they literally got angry at me for suggesting it," Apatow says. "And I said...
...full-grown man is spending a lot of time with a teenage boy. "I'm such a comedy fan that even though he's 16, I know I'm hanging out with one of the guys who's going to be one of the great comics," says Apatow. Rogen's co-stars felt the same way. "It didn't occur to me that when he was doing Freaks and Geeks he was a teenager. I figured he was actually 40," says Paul Rudd, the handsome guy who has played Rogen's goofy sidekick in the past two Apatow films...
...when Undeclared was canceled after one season, Rogen didn't get many auditions. "It didn't bother me very much. I didn't think I'd ever be an actor," says Rogen. "I thought I was going to be a writer." All the time, like some sort of '70s-movie kung-fu master, Apatow was coming up with ridiculous writing tests for Rogen and Goldberg to pass: turn an idea of his into a movie in 10 days (even though nothing was going to happen at the end of 10 days); come up with 100 one-page-long ideas...