Working with Katherine Heigl: “She’s awesome,” said Rogen. “She’s really, really, really funny. I’m blown away and terrified by her at the same time. We spend half the movie screaming at each other, and she screams a lot better than I do. She could tear me a new one. Her fiancé’s always on set and I say, ‘You get this sh*t at home?’ ‘Sometimes.’”
Paul Rudd Doesn’t Take Sides: Rudd plays Katherine Heigl’s brother-in-law in Knocked Up and according to the actor, his character has problems of his own. “We kind of become friends, but I’m in my own little world of despair. Getting older, settling down, having kids, being married – these are sacrifices that you make. There are amazing sides to it and then there are sacrifices you make. And I think my character years ago might have lived with a bunch of dudes and started a website [like Rogen’s character does]. That sounds like it might be pretty awesome. But there’s no way in hell that could be my reality now. But Leslie Mann, who plays my wife, are going through our own kind of issues of a couple who’ve been married a while.”
Stage vs. Screen Work: Rudd’s been busy balancing stage work and time on movie sets. “They’re just different experiences,” explained Rudd. “I like doing comedies like this because when something organic happens, it can be so weird and funny. And just from a creative stand point, it’s exciting to go to work everyday because you don’t know what the scene will yield.
It’s very rare that we film a scene and it’s exactly as it was written in the script. Sometimes it’ll go off into different directions. Like the one the other day – the whole Steely Dan run. I play a guy in the music business and we had no idea where everything went. I was saying that a band like Steely Dan could never get signed today and they’d never get any radio play. He says, ‘That’s because Steely Dan sucks.’ And we get into this whole thing like ‘No, Steely Dan is amazing, the early Steely Dan,’ and [Rogen] said something like, ‘I don’t think you’d get into a Steely Dan concert without wine and cheese. If you ever catch me listening to Steely Dan, you could cut my head off with a Spyro Gyra record.’
Rogen added, “Stuff like that… I liked that Back to the Future run. Me and Rudd are amused by very similar obscure referential types of things. We will degenerate any scene to us arguing about Back to the Future.”
“We both have the same kind of useless, encyclopedic knowledge of the most random facts or people,” admitted Rudd. “So no one else will laugh, but me and Seth will just amuse ourselves. It’s just burning a lot of footage.”
Friendship Fuels the Improv: Rogen and Rudd’s offscreen friendship makes the improv process easier. Rudd said, “I think it’s just that we know each other better so there’s already a familiarity with each other’s sense of humor, sensibility. But it can change on any given day. Sometimes, it’s really just snappy and you come up with a lot of different things, and other days it could be after lunch…a night shoot…it could be lots of different factors. It doesn’t always work at the time, but it is kind of nice and maybe a little easier because we know each other.”
Fortunately for Rudd and Rogen, writer/director Apatow allows them an incredible amount of freedom to play. Rogen said, “He’ll never reprimand you for saying anything. What he’ll say is ‘Don’t say that again.’ He’ll never be like ‘I can’t believe you said that!’”
“We’ll also go on a run for a long time and then we’ll do another take and he’ll say ‘Go back to this thing and build on that, focus on that...’” added Rudd.
From Supporting Roles to Playing the Lead: Rogen’s used to being part of the supporting cast, but in Knocked Up he’s actually one of the two main characters. Even so, Rogen likes to think of the film as an ensemble piece. “It’s fun! It’s interesting. I’m not the star of every scene, so it’s not like walking through being the center of the attention. For a lot of the movie, I’m one of five people in a room and Judd’s kids are going to get more laughs than I will in a million years. I just try and approach it scene by scene, and try not to think of myself as the star of anything. I see it as an ensemble, really. There’s a lot of people in the movie and if were just me, it’d be really boring.”
