Seth Rogen gets candid about 'devastating' film reviews

Seth Rogen recently spoke about the impact of bad film reviews in a discussion about mental health on ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast.

The comedian told host Steven Bartlett that negative reviews are ‘devastating’. 

“I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things,” Rogen said.

“It’s devastating. I know people who have never recovered from it honestly – a year, decades of being hurt by [film reviews]. It’s very personal…It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad, and that’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It fucking sucks.”

“For Green Hornet, the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad,” Rogen said.

“People hated it. People were taking joy in disliking it a lot. But it opened to like $35 million, which was the biggest opening weekend I’d ever been associated with at that point. It did pretty well. That’s what is nice sometimes. You can grasp for some sense of success at times.”

For Rogen it was harder to withstand the negative reviews for The Interview, the actor said.

“That felt far more personal. Green Hornet’ felt like I had fallen victim to a big fancy thing. That was not so such much a creative failure on our parts but a conceptual failure. ‘The Interview,’ people treated us like we creatively failed and that sucked.”

The Pineapple Express actor said he used to deal with negative reviews by treating himself to a nice dinner or retreating to his beach house. He added, “Any opening weekend, it sucks. It’s stressful. It’s like birth, it’s an inherently painful process.”

The actor said he keeps working to cope with it all.