Seth Rogen has confirmed, in his most direct terms yet, that his two-decade friendship and creative partnership with James Franco is finished — and that the silence between them has stretched so long it no longer feels like a rupture so much as a settled fact.
Speaking to The New York Times, Rogen declined to relitigate the details, citing the personal complexity of the situation. “I honestly think the nuance of it is too personal for me to get into right now,” he said. “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.”
The two men first met as teenagers on the NBC cult series Freaks and Geeks in 1999 — Rogen was 16, Franco 21 — and went on to build one of the more reliably profitable comedy partnerships of their generation, appearing together in Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, This Is the End and The Interview. That history makes the estrangement notable, but Rogen’s language this week suggests it no longer registers for him as an open wound.
The break traces back to 2018, when five women, four of them acting students, publicly accused Franco of sexually exploitative behavior. Rogen initially said he would keep working with his friend, a position he later walked back in a 2021 interview, acknowledging that the allegations had materially changed their relationship and that he had no plans to collaborate again. What he stopped short of saying then — that the friendship itself was over — he has since confirmed by absence.
Franco made the rupture explicit in 2024, telling Variety he had tried to reach Rogen without success: “I love Seth, we had 20 great years together, but I guess it’s over. And not for lack of trying. I’ve told him how much he’s meant to me.”
Franco has slowly returned to acting in recent years. He teased at Cannes last month that he is set to appear in a major studio film, which would mark his first such role in nearly a decade. His Italian drama Hey Joe opened in select theaters and on VOD in March.
Rogen, meanwhile, has continued to work steadily, most recently through his Apple TV+ series The Studio, which he created and stars in. His comments to the Times land less as a fresh development than as a periodic restatement of a position he has held for years — notable mainly because Franco’s recent, tentative re-emergence in Hollywood has kept the question alive.
