Why Seth Rogen finds bad reviews devastating

Seth Rogen got honest this week about how it feels to get bad reviews for his acting work. While on a podcast with Steven Barlett, Rogen explained that receiving bad movie reviews was devastating, and he struggles with not taking it personally.

The Canadian-born actor had roles in ‘Green Hornet’ and ‘The Interview’, which were both highly criticized.

Critics should be more considerate?

On Steven Bartlett’s podcast, ‘The Diary of a CEO’, in an episode entitled ‘Seth Rogen Opens Up About His Self-Doubt & Struggles That Nobody Sees’, Rogen shared his experiences with bad reviews and commented that it was hard not to take them personally.

According to the 40-year-old actor, critics should be more considerate of the feelings of those involved before writing a bad review.

“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.”

“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 [...] sucks.

“I know people who have never recovered from it honestly — a year, decades of being hurt.”

‘Green Hornet’ reviews

Rogen talked about his own personal experience from his role in the 2011 superhero comedy movie, ‘Green Hornet’, alongside Jay Chou and Cameron Diaz, which received poor overall reviews and only a 44 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

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

‘The Interview’ far more personal

Seth Rogen recounted another experience where one of his other movies was criticized. His 2014 comedy with James Franco, ‘The Interview’, received reviews even worse than ‘Green Hornet’.

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

When Rogen feels down about bad movie reviews, he says he can usually cheer himself up by going out to a nice dinner or going to his beach house — but the best way to heal for him is to keep working.

“That’s another funny thing about making movies … life goes on,” Rogen mused. “You can be making another movie as your movie is bombing, which is a funny thing. It’s bittersweet. You know things will be okay. You’re already working.”

“If the fear is the movie bombs and you won’t get hired again, well you don’t have to worry about it. But it’s an emotional conundrum at times.”