Seth Rogen

On 11 January 2026 he collected his first Golden Globe from Zoë Kravitz and Dave Franco, who play versions of themselves in The Studio. "This is so weird," he said from the stage. "We just pretended to do this. And now it's happening." He had been working in Hollywood for twenty six years and, until the previous autumn, had never won anything.

He was born on 15 April 1982 in Vancouver. His father, Mark Rogen, worked for non profit organisations; his mother, Sandy Belogus, is a social worker, and the two of them met on a kibbutz in Israel. Stand up came at twelve, after he signed up for a comedy workshop, and he spent his teens performing at night in bars he was too young to drink in.

From bar mitzvah class to Judd Apatow

He met Evan Goldberg in bar mitzvah class and they ended up at the same school, Point Grey Secondary, which later gave their production company its name. That is where they started writing Superbad, about two friends trying to buy alcohol before the school year runs out. They were thirteen or fourteen, depending on which of them you ask, and it took more than a decade to get made.

At sixteen he turned up to an open casting call in Vancouver and Judd Apatow put him in Freaks and Geeks, which NBC cancelled after eighteen episodes and which then became a cult show. Dropping out of school, he moved to Los Angeles and followed Apatow to 'Undeclared', writing for it as well as appearing in it.

His first Emmy nomination, in 2005, had nothing to do with acting. It came for writing 'Da Ali G Show' with Sacha Baron Cohen. Small film parts were arriving by then too: one of the bullies in Donnie Darko and a cameraman in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

The 40 Year Old Virgin and the Apatow decade

Being one of the shop floor colleagues who torment Steve Carell and Paul Rudd in The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) got him noticed. Two years later Apatow handed him the lead in Knocked Up, opposite Katherine Heigl, and the bearded guy who swore very fast was suddenly a box office actor.

Superbad arrived that same summer of 2007, with Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in the parts he and Goldberg had written for themselves as teenagers. He took the role of an idiot cop instead. Then came Pineapple Express, a stoner comedy with shootouts in it and James Franco in a dressing gown, Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Funny People, where he plays an aspiring comic looking after a dying star.

Alongside that he built a voice career that has never stopped: Mantis in Kung Fu Panda and its sequels, B.O.B. in Monsters vs. Aliens, Morton in Horton Hears a Who!. There were paid rewrite jobs too, on Drillbit Taylor and The Watch, which he tends to cite as examples of what he does not want to do again.

Superheroes did not work out. The Green Hornet (2011), which he co-wrote and starred in for Michel Gondry, landed halfway between a comedy and an action film and satisfied nobody. That year he made up for it with three smaller ones: Paul, Sarah Polley's Take this Waltz and above all 50/50, written by his friend Will Reiser out of his own cancer diagnosis, in which Rogen plays a version of himself driving Joseph Gordon-Levitt to chemotherapy.

The Sony hack

Their directing debut was This is the End (2013), in which half of American comedy plays itself through the apocalypse at Franco's house. Its success bought them The Interview, a farce about two television journalists recruited by the CIA to kill Kim Jong Un.

What happened next got away from everybody. In November 2014 a cyberattack emptied Sony Pictures' servers and leaked emails, salaries and entire films. The attackers threatened cinemas, the big American chains refused to book the picture and Sony cancelled the release on 17 December. Barack Obama said publicly that the studio had made a mistake.

Sony changed its mind within days. It opened on 25 December in around three hundred independent cinemas and simultaneously online for rent, which nobody was doing at the time. Four days later it had logged more than two million digital transactions and fifteen million dollars, the biggest online release the studio had ever had.

Point Grey, the dramas and the voices

The company he set up with Goldberg turned into the steadiest part of his working life. Out of it came Preacher, The Boys and its spin off Gen V, Invincible, where he also voices Allen the Alien, Future Man, Black Monday, Pam & Tommy and Platonic, the last of those reuniting him with Rose Byrne. On the film side Point Grey has produced Blockers, Good Boys, Joy Ride, Cobweb and Miller's Girl.

His acting range widened as it went. Steve Wozniak for Danny Boyle in Steve Jobs, the script supervisor who swears he was the one really directing Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, a journalist in love with Charlize Theron in Long Shot, a hedge fund manager flattened by Reddit in Dumb Money. 'An American Pickle' (2020) had him playing opposite himself twice, as a Jewish immigrant preserved in brine and as his own great grandson.

Steven Spielberg gave him his best dramatic part in The Fabelmans, as Uncle Bennie, the family friend who breaks everything without meaning to. Animation kept the box office ticking: Pumbaa in The Lion King and Mufasa: The Lion King, Donkey Kong in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Bebop in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which he wrote as well, and Frank in Sausage Party, the adults only cartoon about an existentialist supermarket.

The Studio and thirteen Emmys

Apple TV+ launched The Studio in March 2025, created by Rogen, Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez. Rogen plays Matt Remick, the new head of a declining studio who loves movies and spends his days wrecking them. Catherine O'Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Chase Sui Wonders and Bryan Cranston are around him, and half of Hollywood walks through the episodes, Martin Scorsese included.

At the Emmys in September 2025 the show took thirteen awards, the most any comedy has ever won for a single season. Four of them were his, for acting, directing, writing and producing, which tied the record for the most Emmys won by one person at one ceremony. Two Golden Globes followed, plus the international BAFTA and the top prizes from the directors', writers' and producers' guilds.

A fifth Emmy arrived in 2026 for something else entirely: the fiftieth anniversary 'The Muppet Show' special that Point Grey made for Disney+ with Sabrina Carpenter. Season two of The Studio was shot in Los Angeles across the year and has wrapped. At the Savannah film festival in late October he said Madonna turns up in it and took the whole game entirely seriously.

That film year was just as full. Napoleon in Andy Serkis's Animal Farm was a voice job, Good Fortune put him next to Keanu Reeves in Aziz Ansari's first film as director, and Point Grey produced Tiny Fugitives, Michael Lewen's summer camp comedy with Johnny Knoxville.

Then there is The Invite, which Olivia Wilde directed and stars in for A24, an English language remake of Cesc Gay's Spanish film Sentimental. Rogen is Joe, the neighbour from upstairs, with Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton completing a cast of four. It premiered at Sundance in January 2026 and reached American cinemas in the summer.

Away from work, he has been married to the actor and writer Lauren Miller since 2 October 2011. They have no children and have said in several interviews that they do not plan to. After her mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's the two of them set up Hilarity for Charity, which funds research and supports families caring for someone with the disease. In February 2014 Rogen testified before a United States Senate subcommittee and used part of his time to tell off the senators who had not bothered to show up.

He also sells weed. Houseplant, the company he runs with Goldberg, started in Canada and later crossed into the United States, He took up pottery during the pandemic, and the ashtrays and vases the brand sells are now his own designs. On Franco, who he worked with for close to twenty years, he said in 2021 that he regretted claiming three years earlier that he would carry on working with him, and that he had no plans to do so again.

The latest headline he is in was not one he went looking for. In late October 2026, on the podcast 'Crafty', Scorsese explained that his 'Cleopatra' project with Angelina Jolie collapsed because of The Interview: "they ruined everything. Just because Kim Jong Un doesn't have a sense of humor." The script had been ready to go. Twelve years on, with five Emmys at home, Rogen is still getting invoices for that film.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Seth Rogen is Donnie Darko (2001); in all, 58 films and 13 TV shows over 25 years. They have worked as actor in 63, producer in 24, writer in 10 and director in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Kung Fu Panda (2008), with 90 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 29 titles. The person they have worked with most is Evan Goldberg, on 24 films, among them The Green Hornet and Sausage Party.