- Seth Rogen spoke about the effects of negative reviews on the "Diary of a CEO" podcast.
- "It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad."
Seth Rogen wishes film critics knew how much their words hurt sometimes.
During an appearance on Steven Bartlett's "Diary of a CEO" podcast Monday, Rogen, who recently starred in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated "The Fabelmans," spoke about his experience of self-doubt and how reading harsh criticism from film reviewers can be "devastating."
"It hurts everyone, very much," he admitted. "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."
"I know people who've never recovered, honestly — years, decades of being hurt by this. It's very personal."
"It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad," he continued. "That's something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It fucking sucks."
The conversation then moved on to "The Green Hornet" (2011), which Rogen starred in as well as co-wrote and produced. The movie received negative reviews upon its release and currently holds a 44% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The actor said: "For 'The Green Hornet,' the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad and people just kind of hated it. It seemed like a thing people were taking joy in disliking a lot."
"But it opened to like $35 million, which was the biggest opening weekend I'd ever been associated with in any capacity so it also did pretty well. So it was a funny thing. That's what's nice sometimes. You can grasp for some sense of success at times," Rogen said.
However, Rogen said that it was "more painful" to face the criticism of his controversial comedy "The Interview" (2014), which he starred in and co-directed with longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg.
While he considered "The Green Hornet" more of a "conceptual failure" rather than a creative one, he said that when it came to his humorous imagining of the assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, "people treated us like we creatively failed, which sucked much worse."
The actor explained the negative reaction hit much closer to home because "people were taking joy in talking shit about it and questioning the types of people that would want to make a movie like that."
Rogen said that he has generally gotten better at dealing with harsh criticism in the two decades since he's been working as an actor, producer, and writer, but still finds the run-up to a new project's release "stressful."
"Any opening weekend and any time I have a thing coming out, it sucks because it's just stressful," he said. "It's like birth, which is just an inherently painful process, even though it is maybe bringing something beautiful into the world, it is a painful act."
"When I was younger I really did not have as much perspective as I do," he added. "Now, I do not carry it with me as much as I used to."