Seth Rogen has confirmed to the New York Times that he has not spoken to James Franco “in a long time” and has “no plans” to work with him again — the most direct statement yet from Rogen that the men’s 20-year creative partnership is definitively over.
Speaking in an interview confirmed by Variety on Friday, Rogen was frank: “I honestly think the nuance of it is too personal for me to get into right now…Nothing has changed since the last time I talked about all this, and I haven’t worked with him in a really long time and I have no plans to.” On the question of whether they had spoken recently: “I haven’t talked to him in a long time, no.”
Rogen also revisited a 2018 comment that had drawn criticism — a moment when he suggested he would continue working with Franco despite the allegations — and acknowledged it without qualification: “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.”
The two men collaborated for two decades, beginning on NBC’s Freaks and Geeks in 1999 and running through Knocked Up (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), This Is the End (2013) and The Interview (2014). The partnership fractured following Franco’s 2018 sexual misconduct allegations from five women, four of them former acting students, who filed a class action lawsuit alleging he had misused his position as a teacher and employer. Franco settled the case in 2021 for $2.23 million without admitting wrongdoing.
Franco addressed the estrangement in a 2024 Variety interview, saying: “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.” Rogen’s most recent comments confirm that Franco’s characterisation was accurate.
Rogen is one of the most commercially successful writer-directors working in Hollywood today. He created and stars in the Apple TV+ satire The Studio, a portrait of the film industry that became one of the network’s most critically lauded recent commissions, and narrated Tangles, an animated film with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston that premiered at Cannes in 2026. There, he also generated headlines with blunt comments on AI and writing: “If your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn’t be a writer.”
The week has brought a run of Hollywood figures speaking candidly about the limits of past professional relationships. Claire Danes recalled Leonardo DiCaprio’s serious intervention on the Romeo + Juliet set after she handled a prop gun carelessly in a moment that now resonates differently in the post-Rust era, while Russell Crowe spoke bluntly about why Gladiator II failed to live up to the original’s moral core.
