Today in news of the We’ve All Been There variety, Seth Rogen, fresh off the launch of Platonic’s second season and a slew of Emmy nominations for The Studio, is looking back on his ultimately futile shrooms-counteracting strategy prior to a long-form interview with Marc Maron.
During his appearance on The Tonight Show on Wednesday, Rogen was asked about Bryan Cranston’s scene-stealing turn in The Studio, which naturally led to him looking back on his and frequent collaborator Evan Goldberg’s shrooms-fueled conversation with Maron during promo for 2013’s apocalyptic comedy This Is the End.
“Not surprisingly, I’ve mistimed the ingestion of drugs with important events in my life,” Rogen told Jimmy Fallon. “Me and Evan were promoting This Is the End and we were gonna be on Marc Maron’s podcast early in the morning one morning. The night before was the premiere. We stayed up very late doing mushrooms, a lot of mushrooms. Then the next morning, we lived right near each other so we were picked up by the same car and we were getting driven to the podcast and we looked at each other and we were both like, ‘I think I’m still on mushrooms.’ And we’re about to do a long, in-depth interview.”
Seth and Evan quickly came up with a would-be remedy in which they would both “pound as much coffee as we fathomably can” at a nearby Starbucks before arriving at Maron’s house, the hope being, in theory, that the high volume of caffeine might “shock” their brains back into some level of normalcy. But this, of course, did not work. In fact, the shrooms then came back with a vengeance.
“It caused our hearts to beat really fast and it just surged all the mushrooms through our body again in a crazy way,” Rogen recalled. “We sit down in Marc Maron’s little guesthouse thing to do the interview. There was a moment where I felt a hand reach out and touch my hand and it was Evan just staring at me. We’ve known each other a long time and I know the look was ‘I’m still 100 percent on a lot of mushrooms right now.’ I look back at him and gave him the look like ‘I, as well, am fully on mushrooms right now.’”
Rogen jokingly added that he’s “been afraid to listen” to the interview in the years since, though he’s been told the shroomsiness of it all is not noticeable.
See more from Rogen and Fallon above.
This week, Platonic, co-starring Rose Byrne, kicked off its second season on Apple TV+, also the home of the Rogen and Goldberg-helmed The Studio. Both series have been met with universal acclaim from critics, with the latter earning guest star Martin Scorsese his first-ever acting nomination at the Emmys.
As for This Is the End, the modern classic is always worthy of a rewatch. Maybe do that this weekend, then pair it with Maron's incredible new special Panicked.