Seth Rogen is not lazy

It’s Seth Rogen week. He’s everywhere promoting his new film, Observe and Report.

This past weekend he was on SNL and a bunch of print interviews are flooding my inbox.

Here’s some snippets from NJ.com

Does he always play himself?

“People are always like, ‘So you’re playing yourself, basically,” he says one morning in Manhattan, sitting in a publicist’s borrowed office. “But I’ve never played a really successful, motivated guy. None of my characters wakes up at 8:30, gets coffee and then writes for 16 hours. And that’s what I do most days. I’m not just hanging out, clicking on porn sites.”

On Hollywood:

“Hollywood has a way of making you very bitter very fast,” he says, “I get there, suddenly I’m on a TV show, which I think is awesome, and I go to a party — and I realize nobody cares. Girls won’t talk to me because my ratings are low … It was insane. I realized it was all a popularity contest. I thought I had left high school and suddenly I was in a whole city that was like high school.”

The experience, Rogen says, “made me angry — I was really an angry, angry guy. … I’d written ‘Superbad’ (with Evan Goldberg) and nobody wanted it. And at the same time I’m getting auditions for these really, really crappy movies. And I’m thinking, ‘They’re making this? And they won’t read our script?’ It took me a while to learn to let that go.”

On Judd Apatow & Jonah Hill:

“One of the things Judd’s taught us most is that a good idea can come from anywhere,” Rogen says. “Jonah came in to do one line, literally, in ’40-Year-Old Virgin,’ but he improvised and we realized he was pretty funny and Judd spent like four hours shooting him, and after that he started getting other jobs, all because of that one line. Where, another director, it’d be ‘Yeah, great, next.’”

On casting people that look like regular people:

“Which shouldn’t be such a giant ideological slant, you know?” he says. “It’s such a simple thing, but it made a huge difference. I mean, I know I didn’t relate to high school movies growing up. The nerdy high schooler in ‘Risky Business’ who can’t get a girl? And he’s played by Tom Cruise? Who relates to that?”