Seth Rogen Says the Comedy Line He Won’t Cross Is Jokes About Infidelity
I never thought I’d see the day when a Seth Rogen vehicle would raise my eyebrow for how he doesn’t have sex with a woman well out of his league.
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Rogen’s AppleTV+ series Platonic premiered yesterday – in it, Rogen and Rose Byrne co-star as a pair of middle-aged former best friends who reconnect after years of separation to find each other in startlingly different stages of life. Early reviews have been almost universally positive, as critics commend the sharpness of Platonic’s writing and the sexlessly carbonated chemistry between the two Neighbors stars in their first appearance together as something other than a visually incompatible couple.
Speaking to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Rogen explained how drastically different Platonic’s approach to portraying mixed-gender friendships is from his early work like Zack and Miri Make a Porno — specifically, Platonic stays true to its name and promises no hint of romantic or sexual tension between its leads. Importantly, both characters are already spoken for — Byrne is a happily married family woman while Rogen is in a rebound relationship with a much younger girlfriend following an acrimonious divorce. For Rogen, those fictional relationships represent a barrier that cannot be crossed in comedy; he believes that there’s absolutely nothing funny about cheating.
While it’s reassuring to know that Platonic won’t take the tired path already tread by classics such When Harry Met Sally when focusing on a straight man and a straight woman who just happen to enjoy each other’s company, it’s worth noting that, in Platonic, Byrne’s husband is played by Luke Macfarlane, a man whose face looks like someone typed the words “Tom Brady if he ran a French Bulldog rescue” into an A.I. image generator. Only on a Seth Rogen project would an audience need to be promised beforehand that this guy won't be cuckolded by a bong hit with a beard.
