Even Seth Rogen finds his new Sausage Party show "unbelievably shocking"
Rogen says he managed to horrify co-star Kristen Wiig by showing her footage from Amazon's Sausage Party: Foodtopia
If there’s a celebrity we’re inclined to believe when it comes to describing his own work as shocking or not, it’s probably Seth Rogen. Over the last decade or so, Rogen—in both his capacity as an actor, and especially as a producer on some of the goriest, grossest TV in living memory—has put some truly vile material on the screen (Preacher, Invincible, The Boys) with a cheerfully straight face. So when he notes that his new Sausage Party series Foodtopia—a follow-up to the 2016 R-rated animated film which, in case you’d forgotten, ends with talking foods murdering every human they can see before engaging in a full-on, highly detailed foodstuff orgy—is “unbelievably shocking,” we’re genuinely convinced.
This is per a new interview with Rogen in Empire, also touching on The Boys and its new spin-off Gen V, which, like Sausage Party, he produces with Evan Goldberg. (They’re also making that new Ninja Turtles movie, which presumably does not end in a horrifying animated orgy.) Rogen describes doing a special airing of one sequence from Foodtopia for Amazon PR, prefacing it by informing all assembled that, “You should all just start wrapping your heads around this now. You’ll probably have to talk about this a lot.” Rogen adds that, “We had Kristen Wiig in picking up a few lines the other day, and I think we’ve all become desentised to it, because we’ll just be like, ‘Roll the scene!’, and then she was like, ‘Oh my God?! This is insane!’”
Rogen notes in the interview that he gets very little pushback from Amazon when it comes to this stuff: “In general, if you’re making an R-rated thing, they let you do whatever the fuck you want, unless there’s some real legal thing that they think you might be bumping against. With The Boys, maybe it requires one extra five-minutes phone call, where they’re like, ‘Really?’, and you’re like, ‘Really.’”
Sausage Party: Foodtopia is currently set for a 2024 release date. Meanwhile, we find ourselves obsessively wondering whether the series will address the original movie’s even-stranger ending—in which Rogen’s character learns he’s an animated character being played by Seth Rogen, and decides to cross dimensions to murder him. Inquiring minds want to know!