Seth Rogen Says ‘Catastrophic’ Backlash From The Interview ‘Re-Calibrated’ What He Finds ‘Controversial’

Seth Rogen will never again mistake internet chatter for real controversy because of what he experienced in the wake of his 2014 Sony film The Interview.

“At the time, it was really bad and really catastrophic,” Rogen said on Monday’s episode of Tony Hawk and Jason Ellis’ Hawk vs. Wolf podcast.

“People we knew were getting fired over it. The head of the studio got fired essentially because of it. It really caused like seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time,” he added, referring to former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, who has openly acknowledged that her 2015 exit was because she was fired.

Seth Rogen Says The Interview Changed Hollywood

“How business was done in some ways, it actually kind of showed the success a movie can have in some ways if it has a full theatrical campaign and then goes directly to streaming. It streamed on Google, and I think it’s still the biggest movie that’s ever streamed on Google, which is crazy… Students come up to me and they’re like, they’re teaching me about it in my university class. It’s wild,” Rogen added.

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The movie, directed by Dan Sterling, follows Rogen and James Franco as two Hollywood tabloid-TV journalists who secure an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), only to be recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.

After that experience, he’s much less bothered by small internet kerfluffles, saying The Interview “re-calibrated what I consider to be, like, controversial. Which I think is good.”

“I think as a comedian.. a lot of people like to think they’re embroiled in some sort of controversy, and after that, I was like, now I know what it’s like. Unless the president’s giving news conferences about it, it’s not really a controversy. Some people getting mad about something on social media, that’s not controversy. Having like the U.N. have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy,” he said.

Listen to the full podcast episode below.

Main Image: James Franco and Seth Rogen in The Interview. Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures.