Seth Rogen has made some critically-acclaimed movies like The Fabelmans and has starred in some not-so-great films throughout his career. The actor is now opening up about how reading opinions from film critics can be very hurtful.
“I think if most critics knew how much it hurt the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things,” he said on the Diary of a CEO podcast. “It’s devastating.
I know people who never recover from it honestly, years, decades of being hurt. It’s very personal… It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad. That’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It f****ing sucks.”
One of the films that received a lot of negative reviews was 2011’s The Green Hornet. However, Seth Rogen said that box office results were the silver lining among the negative feedback from critics.
“For Green Hornet, the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad,” Rogen said. “People just kind of hated it. It seemed like a thing people were taking joy in disliking 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’s nice sometimes. You can grasp for some sense of success at times.”
It was the reviews for The Interview he was more upset about as it felt like a “personal rejection” to him being a producer and director of the comedy.