Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne played a happily married couple to great success in the Neighbors films. But when the franchise’s director, Nicholas Stoller, approached them to star opposite each other in his and wife Francesca Delbanco’s Apple TV+ comedy Platonic, he was after a different dynamic.
He was eager to trade on their chemistry while assuring audiences that their characters, who play longtime friends, would never actually hook up. Rogen and Byrne both jumped in, debuting their first hard-R — or, in this case, TV-MA — comedy in years.
With the actors strike behind them, the duo hopped on a Zoom from opposite coasts in early December to discuss their onscreen partnership, the future of the series and why Rogen fears his scalp may never be the same.
Why was this the next project that you two wanted to do together?
ROSE BYRNE Nick came to me with the idea initially in 2019, and I was like, “What about Seth?” Because it lives and dies on the chemistry of these two characters, and we’d had success with the Neighbors movies and had fun working together. It’s also a really specific idea that I hadn’t seen done about a platonic friendship between a man and a woman — and a woman of a certain age. I’m middle-aged and have kids, and so does the character. There were many things I thought would be interesting, and I didn’t want to do it without him.
SETH ROGEN Me and Nick have been friends for a long time. We shared an office when I was 18 and he was probably 21 or 22. I remember when he and Francesca started dating, I was at their engagement party; I set off fireworks in their front yard very dangerously. I’m so proud of what we did on the Neighbors films, and I had so much fun making them. It was the combination of Nick and his sensibility and my chemistry with Rose and our shared understanding of tone and timing. … We get along very well, but even if we didn’t, I’d want to keep working with her because the result is very good.
This is a hard-R comedy, not a tragedy masquerading as a comedy, as we often see on TV. Why was that important or appealing to you?
ROGEN Honestly, if it’s a half-hour today, it’s a comedy; if it’s an hour, it’s a drama. That said, I love all these shows, but here was this opportunity of, like, can we bring this hard-R, raucous, fun, fast-paced but emotionally driven, grounded comedy to TV in a way that we had in a lot of movies? We were trying to bring that energy to TV, which seemed kind of intuitive, but not something that you see a ton of — comedy that’s really set-piece-oriented and designed to make people laugh.
I’m curious if you feel like the parameters are different with TV?
ROGEN Television is not as overthought as the film industry is at this moment by the people making it. There’s so much speculation as to the future of the film industry that in and of itself trips people up and makes them overthink. In TV, they’re just like, “We need more!” That said, I do think R-rated comedy will do well in theaters.
The conceit of the show is that they won’t get together. How conscious were you while filming of not potentially misleading the audience?
BYRNE Incredibly conscious. There was a constant conversation about [how to assure the audience], short of us looking into the camera and going, “We’re not going to get together.”
ROGEN It’s almost hard to tell the audience not to think something because the more you do that, they don’t believe you. I was just talking to someone last night who was watching the show, and he was like, “I was so happy you didn’t hook up. I was a little nervous you would but then very happy it didn’t happen.”
You both move fluidly between comedy and drama. Where are you each more comfortable?
ROGEN I’m never comfortable. (Laughs.)
BYRNE There’s a vulnerability about being in a leotard [in Apple TV+’s Physical] that I just can’t express enough to you, no matter how they light you. But there’s a vulnerability when you really throw yourself into anything, and then you just hope that they’ll do a good job editing you. But I did enjoy doing the more extreme comedic stuff. It had been years since we did the Neighbors movies and all those more hard comedies. It was exciting to revisit it, and nerve-racking.
ROGEN I don’t think I’d done an R-rated comedy in years, either. Long Shot [in 2019] was probably the last one. It’s fun, especially with these people. For me, it’s almost less stressful to do drama because I feel less ownership over it. When I’m doing comedy, I suddenly feel like I have a better sense of how to control it, and therefore my standards get very high. I put a lot of pressure on every scene. I really want it to work and be good. So, it’s more fun in a lot of ways, but it’s also a little more pressurized because I have different standards, I guess, for my comedic work than my dramatic work.
I’d argue that audiences do too.
ROGEN I think especially something like this, where we’re kind of doing what we do. You want it to be good. It’s me, Rose and Nick, doing R-rated comedy. There’s a high standard for that that we’ve put out there, and so you just want to live up to that. You don’t want to take a thing that has worked in the past and then make it not work anymore.
There’s a lot of physical comedy in the show. What was the wildest scene to shoot?
BYRNE I think Nick wrote the ketamine scene thinking, “OK, let’s see what Rose can do with this.” I just pored over footage before we shot it. There’s an incredible number of videos online of people in various states of a K-hole, so I was really blessed with that information. (Laughs.) And then we shot it in this weird little drugstore, and Seth basically carried me around until I fell over and then it was this huge reset. The reset took, like, half an hour, so the pressure was on to get it right. I think we did, like, three or four takes.
ROGEN And I had to learn a Coyote Ugly dance, which I did not know but had a sense of. I also fucked up my shoulder for four months from throwing those scooters. I think I caused semi-permanent damage. And honestly, my hair’s never quite been the same after I bleached it all those times. It’s finally coming back, but I for sure scorched my scalp a bit.
BYRNE But it looked so good. It really did suit you.
ROGEN The joke was that it looked bad, and then I did it and everyone’s like, “It kind of looks good.” And now I walk in downtown L.A. a lot and I see men in their mid-40s and their stupid Hawaiian shirts with bleached blond hair, and they’re like, “I love your show!” And I’m like, “I bet you do.” (Laughs.)
Platonic was initially billed as a limited series. Will you be doing more?
ROGEN Yeah, it looks like we’re going to do more. (Editor’s note: A season two renewal has not been confirmed by Apple TV+.)
In success, nothing is ever limited …
ROGEN Honestly, we had talked about it during the first season, but I get really nervous about how it’s going to be received. I’m not a count-your-eggs-before-they-hatch guy. I’ve done that thing where I drive around Friday night of opening weekend for my movies and go to the theaters and there’s no one in them. I really just wanted to see if we were happy with it when it came out — and if everyone else was happy with it. I was kind of nervous about how high my standards were for what we were doing, and I wanted to make sure that we could actually do it. And then once I saw that we could, I was like, “OK, we should keep doing it.”
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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