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April 15: Seth Rogen
Comic actor, writer, and film producer Seth Rogen, the son of radical secular Jews (his father was an assistant director of the Workmen’s Circle in Canada), was born in Vancouver, British Columbia on this date in 1982. Rogen worked on the television shows Freaks and Geeks and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show before breaking into Hollywood film comedy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He has been a regular collaborator with director-producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Funny People) and with writer Evan Goldberg, Rogen’s co-writer on Superbad, Pineapple Express, This Is the End, and The Interview — a film that gained international notoriety this year by arousing the ire of the North Korean government. Rogen has been committed to comedy since before his bar mitsve; he spent his childhood cracking wise at Jewish schools and summer camps, then dropped out of high school at 16 to relocate to pursue comedy in Los Angeles. He has since become a leading personality of the not-quite-new wave of stoner comedies featuring pleasure-seeking, pot-smoking, silly but sweet men.
“As soon as I realized you could be funny as a job, that was the job I wanted.” —Seth Rogen