Seth Rogen says he didn’t notice when James Franco said their friendship was over: “It really wasn’t on my radar”

Seth Rogen didn’t pay attention to the reaction online after James Franco shared that their friendship was over last year, he’s revealed.

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The actor told The Sunday Times in 2021 that he wasn’t planning on working with his former friend and collaborator Franco again after sexual misconduct allegations were made against the latter.

Franco told Variety last year, “No. I haven’t talked to Seth. I love Seth, we had 20 great years together, but I guess it’s over. And not for lack of trying. I’ve told him how much he’s meant to me.”

When asked by Esquire how it felt “to have something so personal become so public,” Rogen was hesitant to discuss it, saying, “Honestly, I absorb so little media that it really wasn’t on my radar.”

Rogen and Franco first gained attention in the late 1990s on NBC’s cult teen high school comedy-drama Freaks And Geeks, before then starring alongside each other in the 2007 rom-com Knocked Up. Over the next decade, they worked together in comedies including Pineapple Express and This Is The End, with their last movie together being 2017’s The Disaster Artist.

In 2018, Franco was accused of sexual misconduct, with an attorney for Franco denying the allegations at the time. In February 2021, Franco settled a lawsuit with two of the women who’d accused him, and per records from the Los Angeles Superior Court, he agreed to pay $2,235,000 (around £1,700,000).

They claimed that he’d pushed his acting students to perform explicit scenes on camera, while the lawsuit also alleged that Franco and his partners “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behaviour towards female students by sexualising their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects.”

Though Rogen originally said he’d continue working with Franco after the allegations came out, he said otherwise in his Sunday Times interview. He said at the time: “I also look back to that interview in 2018 where I comment that I would keep working with James, and the truth is that I have not and I do not plan to right now,” while he added that the allegations “changed many things in our relationship and our dynamic.”

When the newspaper suggested that the situation must have been painful for him, he said: “Yeah. But not as painful and difficult as it is for a lot of other people involved. I have no pity for myself in this situation.”

Rogen’s new comedy series, meanwhile, is set to hit Apple TV+ next month. The first two episodes of The Studio, which he co-created and executive produced, are set to premiere on March 26.

He plays Matt Remick, an executive who gets promoted to become the head of the fictional Continental Studios just as the movie industry is undergoing huge social and economic changes. Also starring in The Studio are the likes of Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders. Zac Efron, Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron and Zoë Kravitz are among those guest-starring as themselves.

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