Seth Rogen Says Negative Reviews Can Be ‘Devastating’: Some People ‘Never Recover’

Seth Rogen currently stars in The Fabelmans, a best-picture nominee at the 2023 Oscars. But he may still be holding on to the poor responses received by some of his previous films, including the 2011 superhero movie The Green Hornet and 2014’s The Interview—the release of which was compounded by North Korean interference and the Sony hack. 

“I think if most critics knew how much it hurt the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second-guess the way they write these things,” Rogen said on a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. “It’s devastating. I know people who never recover from it, honestly—years, decades of being hurt by [reviews].” He added that the rejection can feel “very personal…. It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad. That’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives, and I get why. It fucking sucks.”

Rogen reflected on the largely negative critical reception to The Green Hornet, noting that “the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad.” He continued, “People just kind of hated it. It seemed like a thing people were taking joy in disliking a lot. But it opened to like [$34 million], which was at the time the biggest opening weekend I’d ever been associated with.”

The actor and producer couldn’t find as much solace in the reaction to The Interview, which would eventually find a home at Netflix after its theatrical release was canceled amid a cloud of controversy. “People [were] taking joy in talking shit about [The Interview] and questioning the types of people that would want to make a movie like that,” Rogen said, adding that while The Green Hornet felt more like “a conceptual failure,” with The Interview, which he codirected alongside Evan Goldberg, “People treated us like we creatively failed, which sucked much worse.”

In the years after those films, Rogen said that he’s gotten more adept at accepting and processing bad reviews. “When I was younger I really did not have as much perspective as I do now,” the 40-year-old said. “I do not carry it with me as much as I used to.”