Seth Rogen on 'The Invite,' 'Tangles' and 10 Years of Not Giving Up

Seth Rogen spent 10 years getting "Tangles" made — and the last thing he plans to do is apologize for the pace. "I truly believe that if we give up on it, that's when it doesn't happen," he told Variety's Awards Circuit podcast, recorded at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia horse country. "Sometimes we don't give up, and we will bring it into existence through sheer brute force."

Rogen is having a year few predicted. Fresh off the historic Emmy run of "The Studio," he arrives with two radically different projects: the A24 dinner-party drama "The Invite" and "Tangles," a hand-drawn, black-and-white animated feature about Alzheimer's disease.

What is 'The Invite'?

Directed by Olivia Wilde, "The Invite" stars Rogen as Joe, a husband whose fraying marriage gets stress-tested over one excruciating evening with the upstairs neighbors, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Rogen credits Wilde for letting the cast reshape the film's tone on set.

"She could have just not used any of it," he said of his improvised material. "And I just would not have been as funny in it." Wilde, he explained, allowed him to insert humor where it wasn't scripted and let Norton deliver dramatic monologues that weren't planned — effectively letting performances rewrite the tone in real time.

Rogen resists the notion that dramatic work earns comedians easy praise. "Among comedians, it almost feels like a bit of a cheat code," he said, recalling Jonah Hill's prediction about "Moneyball" (2011): the role would bring Hill his most acclaim "for sure the easiest thing I've done, because I'm just doing less than I normally do." Hill was right — he earned his first Oscar nomination for supporting actor. Rogen insists "The Invite" is different because people respond to the comedy he actually created on camera.

Why did 'Tangles' take a decade?

Adapted from Sarah Leavitt's graphic memoir about her mother's Alzheimer's, "Tangles" is directed by first-time feature filmmaker Leah Nelson and produced by Rogen's Point Grey Pictures. Roughly seven of its 10 years went to internal development and financing; only the last three were production. The voice cast includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston and Samira Wiley — names Rogen says were "honestly really helpful in getting the movie made."

The process was unforgiving. Studio animated films get reworked repeatedly through screenings; "Tangles," being hand-drawn, "had to be written and then executed, and we could change almost nothing," Rogen said. "When we give up on it is when it doesn't happen." He compares the timeline to "Superbad," "Pineapple Express" and "Sausage Party" — all long-gestating projects. "To me, 10 years is normal."

Independent Film Company and Sapan Studio open "Tangles" this year for an awards-qualifying run, with wider expansion in early 2027. "The Invite" is streaming on HBO Max.

What's next: 'Darkwing Duck' and 'The Studio' Season 2

Rogen is also reviving "Darkwing Duck" for Disney+, a project that survived "corporate restructurings" and years of development. Mark Hamill has a role, and Rogen teased a newly cast Scrooge McDuck he called "the most exciting casting I could ever imagine" — declining to name the actor. He's glad it stayed a series rather than a film: "It's also nice to extract every penny Disney's willing to put into a thing." He'd also love a "Gargoyles" revival and cites "Flight of the Navigator" as a personal favorite.

Season 2 of "The Studio" leans harder into the awards race as a theme, with Madonna and the Venice Film Festival among the reported set pieces. Rogen promised "several" cameo shocks on the level of the Martin Scorsese moment, and said several episodes will unfold in real time with essentially no cuts — half-hour oners (single continuous shots).

He traced his awards education to "Steve Jobs," which took him to Telluride and the New York Film Festival for the first time. "It was like a door to a secret part of the industry that I'd never been invited into was suddenly opened," he said. Awards matter most, he argued, for smaller films and careers: "It could make or break people's careers. It could make or break a film."

The best advice he ever received came from the late stand-up comedian Darryl Lenox when Rogen was around 15: "Any asshole can write that joke." Lenox pushed him to write what only he could write, from his own experience. Rogen says he adheres to it to this day — which is, in effect, the operating principle behind both a dinner-party indie and a decade-long hand-drawn animation about memory loss.