PROFILE: SETH ROGEN

'“Have just been advised Seth only needs 10 mins for grooming,” reads one of the emails that shuttle between his publicists and the Guardian’s photographer, which sounds about right. The roly-poly figure who turns up a few minutes later at the Four Seasons in jeans and t-shirt, sneakers, topped off with jew-fro and froggy grin, seems barely to need ten minutes for anything. “Hey,” he says, “What’s going on?” before settling into a sofa that seems custom-molded to his contours. He talks in sentences that go up, up, up, up, up like a roller-coaster car, his furry eyebrows shooting up for emphasis, before beginning their long descent, down, down, down, down, towards the point, or the punchline, which is invariably marked by a gurgling Mutleyesque laugh of his: “Hurhurhurhurhurhur.”   Spend any amount of time with him and you will hear it a lot. Apatow sometimes teases him, “I don't get why you're funny. Nothing really bad has ever happened to you.” In a business populated by midnight prowlers, mining bottomless pools of pain for their stand-up routines, Rogen stands out for his benign demeanour.  Not that his sense of humour isn’t athletically obscene, but whether riffing about cacking his pants while watching Gladiator, or wondering why   people have deoderants for armpits but not buttcracks, he exudes the gurgling contentment levels of a child, or Buddha. Onscreen, his persona is a matter of zero torque. “He can really go at you hard,” says Apatow, “But underneath it you know he’s a good guy…. I don’t know why I must always look for pain. Even when it is not there.”'  

— from my Gaurdian profile of Seth Rogen