Seth Rogen Talks About His ‘Bordering Blatantly Homophobic’ Early Movies

There have plenty of people who’ve noted that while Seth Rogen’s movies have been popular, a lot of them are also filled with jokes where gay people are the butt of the humour. The actor and his colleagues have sometimes tried to defend it, saying the real joke is against the type of person who talks like that. However, now he’s admitted that some of the humour in his earlier movies probably was homophobic.

Talking to The Guardian, Rogen and his Bad Neighbours 2 co-star Chloë Grace Moretz were asked to re-evaluating previous films through a feminist lens. It appears Rogen has already had a rethink about some of what he’s done in the past, saying “It’s funny looking at some movies we’ve made in the last 10 years under the lens of new eras and new social consciousnesses… There’s for sure some stuff in our earlier movies and even in our more recent movies where even like a year later you’re like, ‘Eh, maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea or some jokes just don’t age as well as others.’”

“There are probably some jokes in Superbad that are bordering blatantly homophobic at times. I mean, they’re all in the voice of high school kids who do speak like that, but I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we were also, to some degree, glamorizing that type of language in a lot of ways.”

Rogen also gives his thoughts on the Sororities and Fraternities that features in Bad Neighbours and its sequel, saying “I think the Greek system seems a little sexist,” Rogen said of the film’s main topic. “The sheer fact that the women and the men don’t have equal rights and opportunities, I think by definition makes it sexist, so that’s something we talked a lot about while we were making this movie.”