The comedy star expands his acting range in ‘50/50’; blending laughs with drama.
‘50/50’
Seth Rogen became a popular comic actor in America thanks to his collaborations with writer-director Judd Apatow. As part of Apatow's comic posse, the Canadian-born comedian/actor first broke into the American market on the cult TV hit Freaks and Geeks in 1999, and went on to collaborate with Apatow in the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, Superbad and Pineapple Express (the latter two he also co-wrote).
In 2003 he was a writer, along with his buddy Will Reiser, for Da Ali G. Show on HBO. That collaboration led to a new direction for the funnyman. In his latest film 50/50, opening Friday, Sept. 30, he and Reiser based their screenplay on Reiser’s battle with cancer.
It’s not exactly a topic that evokes thoughts of laughter, but since Reiser survived, he was up for the suggestion when Rogen thought his friend’s ordeal would make an interesting movie. Rogen is playing a fictionalized version of himself in the movie, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the stand-in for Reiser. The film was directed by Jonathan Levine.
While the movie plays plenty of scenes for laughs, there is also a heartbreaking, serious side to the movie and that is a new direction for Rogen, who also showed a more grown-up side in the movie Take This Waltz. Both films played at the recent Toronto International Film Festival where Rogen talked about playing himself — sort of.
One of the big scenes in the movie is when Adam (Gordon-Levitt) decides to shave his head. He was actually shaving his head for real so they could only do the scene once. Asked about doing it, Rogen says, “It was actually fun to shoot. It was a little scary because we wrote a lot of dialogue for it, which is really pretty fucking stupid honestly, for a scene like that. But we did it. That was actually the first day of shooting. I didn’t know what Joe was going to do. I didn’t know if he was going to start crying and make it really emotional. It was great how he did it. It felt totally real and intense.
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1. Dan O. said... on Oct 3, 2011 at 04:05PM
“Mixing humor and painful subject matter is, naturally, very difficult. The beauty of this movie is that it does so with ease, especially with such good actors in these roles as well. Good review. Check out my review when you get a chance.”