THE JOURNAL
Mr Seth Rogen’s inimitable laugh is just as much fun to hear in real life as it is on screen. He guffaws lovingly as he describes his wife’s signature dish, which is no joke. In the living room of a 1918-built bungalow in Los Angeles, Rogen is explaining the “cheese dreams” his wife, Lauren, bakes when they have people over. Which is all the time. “It’s white bread with cream cheese inside, dipped in butter, cinnamon and sugar and then baked,” he says. “It’s amazing.”
The 41-year-old actor, comedian and filmmaker hosts an annual Thanksgiving dinner for almost 50 of his friends and family. “We have no children, so we feel it falls upon us,” he says. He takes a characteristically relaxed approach to setting the scene. The house in which we meet is scattered with vinyl records, arcade games and, perhaps unsurprisingly, an ashtray on almost every surface. “I have them everywhere,” he says, “to let people know they can smoke. I try to go above and beyond.”
Dressed in a vintage short-sleeved shirt (revealing an arm tattoo of his late dog, Zelda) and a pair of embroidered loafers taken from the set of his recent TV show, Platonic, Rogen’s lifestyle has become inseparable from his frat-pack movies, including Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and his nascent homeware brand, Houseplant.
It all started in Vancouver, where Rogen and his childhood friend turned business partner, Mr Evan Goldberg, started writing the comedy material that resulted in films such as Superbad (2007) and Pineapple Express (2008). The former is early-2000s zeitgeist material, the latter is a multi-million-dollar-grossing stoner action comedy, which remains one of Rogen’s proudest achievements. “We made a funny movie that everyone liked, that was massively profitable, even though we were stoned,” he says.
Having already founded a film production company, Point Grey Pictures, it was a natural progression for Rogen and Goldberg to capitalise on their other great love. With the legalisation of cannabis in Canada and various US states, the duo spotted a gap in the market for a lifestyle brand that sold “things you want around, like records, candles, vases, ashtrays and lighters”. A tie-dye-free zone, they named the company Houseplant.
While the launch of a marijuana-inspired brand may seem like a natural fit for Rogen, the resulting high-end products took the internet by surprise. From statement vases to beautifully designed oil lamps, from the functional to the eclectic, Houseplant is much more than cool ashtrays. It’s a bona fide homeware brand with some serious design credentials. And those design credentials come from Rogen.
“I go to a friend’s house I haven’t been to for a while and I’m like, ‘Oh, you have 25 vases now’”
As anyone who follows him on social media will be aware, Rogen knows his way around a kiln. He had never even tried pottery before agreeing to do a class with Lauren (“She’ll always say, ‘We should go take a lesson together. It’ll be fun’”), but he was hooked. The couple built a studio in their garage and practise daily, often inviting friends who are painters and artists to join them.
In spring 2019, he started posting his creations – mostly ashtrays, some with distinctive, what he calls “gloopy” glazes in striking colours – on Instagram. “I was just doing it to fill a square, but then everyone was like, ‘I love that.’ ‘That’s interesting,’” he says.
“It reminded me of what happened with Pineapple Express a little bit, where people who smoked weed were like, ‘Oh, he’s putting a lot of thought into this and he’s making something nice that I like as a result of that amount of thought.’ That is always very validating and encouraging and will keep me going.”
Rogen makes “tonnes and tonnes of stuff”, which he gives to friends as gifts. He has even ventured into the world of scented candles. “It’s funny because I lose track,” he says. “I go to a friend’s house I haven’t been to for a while and I’m like, ‘Oh, you have 25 vases now. Thank you for keeping them all, but I’ve really inundated you with stuff.’ Part of me thinks they keep them in the closet and bring them out when I come over.”
Rogen, who “unabashedly enjoys aesthetics and delving deep into ceramics and colour and palettes”, and Goldberg, who “has more of a business mind”, make a great team. “Evan’s dad was in finance and he grew up with more of an entrepreneurial spirit,” Rogen says. “My family were broke socialists, so I did not.
“I’ve always found myself to be someone who would work tirelessly to create something expressive of something they felt passionate about. Sometimes those things are good business and sometimes they are not.”
Art has always interested him. “I grew up being really into street art and graffiti because Vancouver had a big graffiti scene and I would read Juxtapoz magazine. I think that drew me to vibrant colours,” he says. “A lot of ceramics are very earthy and try to capture, rightly so, the beauty of the clay, but I became very interested in making the opposite of that.”
Rogen’s biggest influence is the eclectic ceramic sculptor Mr Kenneth Price, whom he discovered after seeing a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “It was one of the most beautiful exhibits I’d ever seen,” he says. “I didn’t even know if it was ceramics. I didn’t know what it was made of. It defied obvious explanation when you saw it in real life and I liked that idea. Ceramics is one of the few art forms you’re invited to pick up and touch and play with. It’s not just visual. It’s a very tactile experience.”
It is not feasible for Rogen to handcraft every item on the Houseplant inventory (his garage studio is not built for mass production), so he works closely with other artists and many products begin life as his personal creations. Any piece finished with his signature gloopy glaze will be unique simply because of how the gloop gloops.
New additions include a crackle vase (crackle being what happens before a glaze gloops) and a sake set (a bottle and two cups) in a tortoise glaze. The idea for the latter came about when he was unable find a sake set for a friend. He made one in his studio, which was quickly picked up by his team.
“It seemed very organic. It’s so pretty,” he says proudly, placing the prototype carefully on the table in front of us. Suddenly he becomes distracted. “This cup wobbles the tiniest bit, so it’ll have to go back to our manufacturer. This cup doesn’t.” I would not have noticed, but it is Rogen’s job to notice. “I literally spend hours poking things, putting them in packages and listening in case they jostle,” he says. “I’m trying to make sure that everything is perfect.”
You will find Rogen in the office between 10.00am and 6.00pm, overseeing everything from prototypes and glazes to the packaging (vibrant coloured boxes that are as Instagramable as the products inside). “I was an early collector of vinyl Japanese Medicom toys, which were always packaged in such a beautiful way,” he says. “It was important to make something that feels bespoke, like you are opening something special.”
He is particularly skilled at multitasking and compartmentalising and has an impressive work ethic. “I’ve always been a hard worker,” he says. “I think it comes from starting work really young and seeing from a young age that the more time and energy we put into stuff, the better it got.”
“The New York Times will write articles telling me I suck. That doesn’t happen with vases”
He would not have survived more than 25 years in Hollywood without an attitude like that. “The problem with being someone who puts so much of themselves into their work is that your work is an avatar or offshoot of you, so if the product is not good, then you don’t feel good.
“I’m very used to having things provide me with immense joy and crushing stress. The more you care about something, the more it can hurt you and stress you out, but I’d never like to look back and think, that could have been better.”
Does he worry about critics? “Home goods is an industry with much less scrutiny than film and TV,” he says. “I feel very safe in this world in comparison to the level of exposure I feel when I make movies.” Some might even say he is having the last laugh. “The New York Times will write articles telling me I suck,” he says. “That doesn’t happen with vases.”