Seth Rogen Developed His Knocked Up Character By Reading With Every Woman Who Auditioned
These days, Seth Rogen is showing up in Steven Spielberg movies and posting pictures of his pottery on Twitter. But back in the early-2000s, he had a near-legendary run appearing in Judd Apatow comedies, which truly jump-started his career. After his supporting role alongside Steve Carell in Apatow's 2005 effort "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Rogen took on the starring role in the director's next project: the romantic comedy "Knocked Up."
Playing Ben Stone, the lovable stoner with a slacker mentality, the actor was described by Peter Sciretta in /Film's original "Knocked Up" review, as someone who "reminds me of a lot of my friends." Scenes with Ben and his band of layabout buddies feel like you're watching actual friends hanging out and busting balls. In fact, the movie succeeded in realistically depicting all kinds of life situations. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann's Pete and Debbie felt so much like an actual couple (they were based on Apatow and Mann's real-life relationship) that in 2012 the director debuted a sort of sequel to "Knocked Up" based around their characters with "This Is 40."
With the "This Is 40" sequel officially in development, the legacy of "Knocked Up" continues to evolve. But it's unlikely anything set in the same universe will top Apatow's original movie, which belongs to the early-2000s golden age when the prolific director/producer seemingly had something to do with every comedy movie that came out. Much of that is down to those realistic performances that feel as though the actors were simply playing themselves. And while there's a lot of that going on in "Knocked Up," in Rogen's case, the now well-established star actually worked pretty hard to develop the character of Ben. And he had a novel way of doing it.
Rogen read with a hundred different actors
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Apatow breaks down his entire career, including a little-known pilot starring Amy Poehler and Kevin Hart which wound up going nowhere. With "Knocked Up" being such a significant movie in establishing Apatow as an industry powerhouse, he of course gives some insight into the film and even elaborates on how Rogen found his character during pre-production. Evidently the then-24-year-old "read with every single woman who came in," for the part that eventually went to Katherine Heigl. The process apparently took "months," with the actor reading with "a hundred different people" and developing the Ben character along the way.
It's probably not too uncommon for actors to develop characters in the process of reading with their future colleagues — though, reading with a hundred people probably isn't a common thing. But as Apatow noted, when actors are yet to become established, there's a different energy to the production process:
"It's different when it's that first movie and [the actors] really wanna score, and they have so much energy and passion ... when you get to your 40th Harrison Ford movie, he tends not to give you that time. And he shouldn't."
Seth Rogan is at Harrison Ford's level
Since "Knocked Up," Rogen has gone on to have a varied career in Hollywood, proving that he can capably take on dramatic roles such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in "Steve Jobs" and now as the avuncular Bennie in Spielberg's "The Fabelmans." Talking to Uproxx about the latter, he actually credits his time working with Apatow as giving him an insight into how to tell "deeply personal" stories on film, claiming the producer/director was a big proponent of including semi-autobiographical elements in his stories.
That was certainly the case with "Knocked Up," with its multiple characters that felt like real people and Pete and Debbie's marriage being based on Apatow's own. And at that time Rogen was a relatively inexperienced actor, having only really appeared in the Apatow-produced TV series "Freaks And Geeks" which was canceled after 12 episodes and a handful of smaller movie parts. Reading with every actor that came in for the Katherin Heigl part was likely a great exercise for the young Rogen, who these days occupies a much more secure position in Hollywood. For "The Fabelmans," he was sought out by Spielberg during the COVID-19 pandemic and then just "hung out for a few months as they put the rest of the movie together." Not quite the same intense commitment to developing his character as he had for "Knocked Up," but at this point, he doesn't need it. He's earned his Harrison Ford status.