Even when he’s off duty, Seth Rogen is a man of the people. The 41-year-old actor, comedian, and filmmaker just got back from vacation, which he sheepishly admits was spent exactly where you’d expect. “I, along with the rest of the world, went to Italy,” he tells me with a chuckle over Zoom. “I didn’t know until I got there and then started looking at other people’s Instagrams! It was like, Oh, no, all the people I came here to avoid are in this country!”
In between his latest return to the raunch-com, by way of Apple TV+’s Platonic with Rose Byrne, and his work on this fall’s GameStop-stock movie, Dumb Money, Rogen has been spending his non-focaccia-feasting time on Houseplant, the cannabis brand and home goods purveyor that the actor cofounded back in 2019, out of his now notorious twin passions for pottery and, of course, weed. This summer the company’s line of grown-up, midcentury-mod-globby ceramics includes a new party ashtray; think Le Creuset but for that dream blunt rotation. Now that the recent waves of weed legalization have made marijuana more mainstream than ever, the stoner-comedy legend himself believes this is what the people deserve: to enjoy our weed, and have nice accessories for it too.
In conversation with Vanity Fair, Rogen talks about what’s changed and what hasn’t in smoking culture, plus some wise advice he got about edibles from Snoop Dogg.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair: Obviously, weed is getting a huge rebrand now that it’s becoming increasingly legalized. When you think back to your youth, or even when Pineapple Express came out in 2008, could you have ever imagined we’d be here now?
Seth Rogen: I grew up in Vancouver, which was probably on the forefront of a legalized-weed-type situation. It was very normalized. Even when I was a kid, there were a few coffee shops you could smoke weed in. I did imagine dreaming of a world where weed was accepted. Alcohol, I always saw as being so much more dangerous, even as a high school kid. Like, I would drink a lot of alcohol and be throwing up and feel terrible all day the next day. And then I would smoke truly heroic amounts of weed, and nothing! Zero negative side effects!
So the hypocrisy was never lost on me. I always hoped that one day weed would be at least as accepted and as culturally available as alcohol, which you can get at grocery stores; you can order it online from anywhere; you can get it at stadiums. Weed is not even remotely like that, and it’s way less dangerous. I am heartened by the strides it’s made, and that it is more accepted than it used to be. But I still definitely think, as far as its legality goes, it has a very long way to go, you know?
Do you get a sense that weed culture is changing along with the market? There’s certainly a more visible kind of connoisseurship lifestyle going on. Houseplant is a part of that.
It’s good. I think it’s making up for lost time. Weed was so stigmatized—something that people were forced to feel bad about, something that they were told made them stupid. People are reveling in the fact that they can enjoy it. As someone who smokes weed, I never felt like a lot of time, energy, or resources were being put into my lifestyle, especially from a product angle. The idea of validating people’s love of weed, to me, is exciting.
People can finally talk about the different strains they like, and the terps they like, and the ways they like to smoke it, and they do get competitive with one another. I think that’s fine. My whole life, I’ve grown up around people with bars and big displays and martini shakers and wine glasses and all this shit, and it’s like, why does alcohol get to have all that stuff? You know? I like when people are indulging their love of weed and nerding out on it.
Have you spent any time in New York lately? There’s, like, a dispensary on every corner now.
I have! I went into so many smoke shops and bodegas and bought random weed. I’m fascinated by the difference between the institutionalized places and the more mom-and-pop places. What’s cool is that there was very high-end weed available and stuff that essentially seems like it’s being sold to you by the guy behind the counter in a Ziploc bag. Overall, I thought the high availability was heartening. It shouldn’t be hard to get weed.