When is it time to grow up? Rogen, this time playing a slovenly, sarcastic, unemployed Internet "entrepreneur," finds out when a drunken night with a woman who's way out of his league (Grey's Anatomy's Katherine Heigl) turns into something more serious. Meanwhile, buddy Paul Rudd risks his marriage to pursue a shameful passion: fantasy baseball.
Apatow: Knocked Up is about a guy who gets a girl pregnant who would never consider being in a relationship with him. But she has no choice but to try. Forced intimacy with good-looking people, this is the common thread. It's like The Breakfast Club. Everything I do is based on The Breakfast Club.
The Geek Chorus
Apatow: I had a very simple approach to hiring Seth's friends: I just hired all of Seth's best friends.
Rogen: If you just cast people you know, you really don't need to think of characters. They kept coming to me — all my friends. And they'd be like, "I don't get my character," and I'd be like, "You're your character. Whatever you would say is what your character would say."
Segel: Martin, Jay, Seth, I mean all those guys I had worked with before. It was nice. It was like the old gang getting back together. We all went to Judd's house for a few days in a row and sat around and just sort of hashed out who wanted to play what type of character, so that there wasn't too much overlap.
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Rogen: My friends would be like, "Yeah, but am I the funny guy or the angry guy?" and I'm like, "You're you. If you feel like being funny, be funny. If you feel like being angry, be angry. It doesn't matter. You will not all seem the same no matter what. Once you're improvising for hours on end, you're just going to do what's funny and natural."
Apatow: I think Seth has lived with almost every person that plays his friends in the movie. I just thought, "He has his joke styles with everybody, so if I hire his real friends and they rehearse and improvise, it will sound exactly like what it does when Seth is hanging out with his buddies," except maybe funnier, because I only pick the funny stuff.
Rogen: I was very happy with the rest of the cast. I knew that even if I sucked, the movie would be good just because Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann and all my roommates are so funny.
Segel: The reality of the situation is that if you're a dude who gets a girl pregnant, the first thing you're doing is going to your friends and saying, "What the fuck am I supposed to do?" And I think that's sort of the function we serve. We're like the Greek chorus, you know? All of our advice is so different that we literally are no help whatsoever. We're sort of the backdrop to remind the audience that a month ago this guy was a pot-smoking, porn-watching clod.
A Sea of Beard Jokes
Apatow: One day in rehearsal we were talking about what we could do to make this group more interesting, and Adam Goldberg, one of the executive producers, said, "We used to do this thing called the Dirty Man Competition. We'd have a bet with a guy to see how long he could go without shaving or showering or cutting his hair," and I thought, "Well, that could be funny."
Rogen: We just thought it would be funny if Martin Starr was growing a beard the whole movie.
Segel: The thing I love about the beard is that at one point, we had the beard idea, and then it was done. We thought we could chart the nine months based on Martin's beard length.
Apatow: It was scary because I thought, "If I make Martin Starr grow a beard the entire movie and the joke bombs, I really destroyed the movie." So I'm so happy our sea of beard jokes worked, because if it hadn't, it would have just sunk us.
Segel: It was also a real exercise in focus to try to think of 30 beard jokes a day. Because every scene ended with one of us making fun of Martin's beard.
Rogen: Suddenly a stupid joke had thousands and thousands of dollars of man-hours put into it. A lot of fake beards were made. There were millions of beard jokes. There's a DVD extra that has like 300 beard jokes on it.
Apatow: Who knew the beard was such fertile ground for comedy? We would write a bunch of them, but then Jonah Goldberg could make beard jokes for five straight hours, so none of that was difficult. You just start thinking about guys with beards: I'll make a Cat Stevens joke, I'll make a Serpico joke, I'll make a Charles Manson joke, I'll make a Taliban joke.
Rudd: There's one scene, where we're sitting in the hospital they all started ripping on him in the hospital, and I say, "Guys, guys leave him alone, after all he did die for your sins."
Segel: There was something really funny too, in that Martin couldn't quite move his mouth naturally as the beard got longer and longer.
Starr: It wasn't the kindest process. I don't think beard technology has been perfected yet. At least not the one I was wearing.
Segel: There was this built-in expressionlessness because he couldn't move his mouth properly. It was just hilarious to watch.
Starr: They were well-made, they looked wonderful, but I couldn't move my face, which forced a strange character to come out. I was uncomfortable throughout the entire movie. I couldn't smile, I couldn't move the cracks of my lips more than two inches before I could feel the beard coming off my face. It wasn't great. It was naturally miserable.
Segel: It was just in the nature of the prosthetic. It instantly made his character even funnier.
Starr: I had yak hair on my face. Actually, it was a mix of human hair and yak hair. That sounded strange to me.
Fantasies About Fantasy Baseball
Paul Rudd (Pete): Throughout the writing of Knocked Up, Judd and I would talk about the problems in our marriages. I'd call him and say, "Here's something that drives me crazy about my wife, and here's something my wife can't stand about me."
Apatow: I said to Paul, "What does your wife hate about you?" and he said, "I'm always sneaking out of the room to play fantasy baseball." And I think a lot of people have that fantasy: Should I go home now, or should I do this thing that has no value?
Rudd: Judd really liked the idea that she thinks her husband is cheating, but what he's really doing is just sneaking away to play fantasy baseball and get away from her, because he needs some time for himself. We wanted this fight to be in kinda a silly setting, but we wanted the fight to be very real and really kinda sad.
Apatow: I think his wife is right for being so pissed off, because it is a betrayal of the marriage and the amount of time she puts into the family. At the beginning you think she's kind of busting his balls, but as the movie goes on you realize he's an enormous pain in the ass.
Rudd: I recently had a kid, and one thing my wife took — understandably — as a very hostile gesture was the fact that I never read any of those baby books. And I said, "People have been doing this for thousands of years! Cavemen didn't have What to Expect When You're Expecting!" That's in the movie.
Apatow: On some level, most people are very immature. So I think everyone relates to the woman who has children but still wants to go dancing at nightclubs, or the guy who says he has an appointment but is actually seeing Spiderman 3.
Rudd: There are things in the movie that are straight out of Judd's life. Leslie Mann [Apatow's real-life wife who plays Alison] and I would perform a fight scene, and it would get very contentious. I was like, "God, Leslie really hates me." She would say, "I don't hate you, I hate Judd."
Rogen: I think the main thing from my life that came out in Knocked Up was just my immense awkwardness around children, specifically Judd's children, who also play the children in the movie. I'm always afraid I'm going to fuck them up and say the one thing that sends them to therapy. Like, "I heard Seth Rogen say ‘cocksucker' when I was 9 years old and ever since then I've been wanting to steal things."
The Aging of Apatow
Rogen: Judd is hitting every major life experience one beat at a time. It's funny, the natural flow of how things have gone with him.
Segel: I think a lot of it too is that we're watching Judd's writing evolve. It's almost like his writing is growing up, too. The subject matter keeps getting older and more mature.
Apatow: You write about the stages you're going through. I guess that will continue until I write Cocoon. Only my characters will be the nerdy older people, afraid that their Viagra won't kick in soon enough.
Online version edited by Jake Swearingen.
Feature Writer-Director (and Geek God) Judd Apatow Invites You Into His Mind
