Seth Rogen has starred and worked on several beloved and acclaimed films, however, he’s also found a lot of success in Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys, a show he helped bring to life as executive producer, and one whose existence is partly owed to Marvel’s own popularity.
Although Rogen is a noted comic book lover, nowadays, he’s not really keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to the kind of PG-13 audience he feels those movies are made for, which hardly comes as a surprise given his penchant for writing and starring in more adult humor. With that in mind, The Fabelmans’ actor and The Boys seem like the perfect pairing, one that really shines in the few cameos Rogen has had in the series.
Regardless of that, Rogen is fully aware that “without Marvel, The Boys wouldn't exist or be interesting. I'm aware of that” as he told Total Film (via GamesRadar), nevertheless, as a movie enthusiast he simply believes the MCU is not for him “as someone who doesn't have children… It is [all] kind of geared towards kids, you know?” That said, it’s not as if Rogen has grudge against Marvel Comics, in fact to this day he remains an avid comic book reader, something that ensured he and The Boys’ executive producer Evan Goldberg really bonded, and ultimately what pushed them to adapt a more grown-up story like the Amazon show.
In fact, Rogen says he remembers when “the first issue of The Boys came out [...] I had the same experience that I think, now, audiences are having,” after being exposed to Marvel stories for so long since Garth Ennis’ work is “not considering younger audiences in the slightest,” but rather catering completely to adults. In the same interview, Rogen also chimed in on the debate around superhero movies, admitting “there's worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there's cinema," perhaps hinting he sees a point in Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino’s arguments against the superhero film genre.
To be fair, Rogen’s views are not black and white as he concedes cinema and entertainment “overlap from time to time,” it’s just that alignment is “becoming increasingly rare.” Conveniently, even if The Boys is television and not cinema, Rogen didn’t address on which camp the series falls, though the show’s propensity to push the envelope and its form of satire certainly make it unique in today’s landscape.
Rogen has had cameos in each of The Boys’ three seasons playing a version of himself in the Supe’s world, however, his most outlandish appearance was as one of Crimson Countess’ clients on the site SupePorn.com, a project showrunner Eric Kripke would also love to turn into a web series.
The Boys is available exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.
Source: GamesRadar+
