Seth Rogen remembers a time George Lucas told him that he wouldn’t save Rogen in the event of a world-ending apocalypse. Was he joking…? You be the judge:
George Lucas has always been a curious kind of cultural icon. He created one of the most beloved and successful sci-fi franchises in history, so of course millions love him, but he’s always seemed kind of inscrutable and hard to read. He has a famously dry sense of humor to the point where it can be hard to tell if he’s joking or not.
Seth Rogen gave an example of that in action when recently stopped by Conan O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. Rogen remembered a time when he and his producing partner Evan Goldberg took a meeting with Steven Spielberg about one project or another. Spielberg is a legendary filmmaker himself, so this is a big deal already. And imagine Rogen and Goldberg’s surprise when Spielberg’s buddy and Star Wars creator George Lucas is there as well. “For like a nerdy kid, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Rogen said.
But when Spielberg had to leave the room for a minute, things got a little strange. You see, this meeting happened back in 2012, when there was a lot of talk about the world potentially ending in December thanks to a prediction by the Mayan calendar. (Remember that? It was odd. There was a whole disaster movie about it.) Anyway, somehow, this came up, and apparently Lucas was taking it seriously.
“Very quickly, the conversation turns to like ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Not great, we’re nearing the end of 2012 and the world is gonna end,’ essentially,” Rogen remembered. “To which me and Evan are like ‘Is he joking?’ A question that still haunts me to this day, and again, I think I know the answer. Was he joking? It did not appear he was joking.”
We [made] a joke like, if you’ve got a spaceship to escape Earth, can we get a seat on that thing?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ It makes me think he wasn’t joking because, if you were joking, you would just say ‘Yes’… But, no, he said, ‘No.’ To this day, I am confounded and plagued by that story.
Why wouldn’t George Lucas take Seth Rogen with him? Was the spaceship not big enough? Does he actually have the spaceship and Lucas didn’t know Rogen was joking? Or was he just joking back in his own bone-dry way and Rogen didn’t notice? These are the questions that keep people up at night.
I’ll also point out that 2012 was the year that Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion and Lucas finally took his leave of the Star Wars universe, so maybe he had a lot on his mind.
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h/t SyFy Wire
