By all accounts, Seth Rogen seems like a really good dude. He’s a multi-talented and massively successful actor, writer, director and producer, not to mention one of Hollywood’s premiere comic stars that supports good causes and makes increasingly elaborate pottery in his spare time.
However, one person who isn’t a fan is Nicolas Cage, and it’s all to do with The Green Hornet. When the movie was in development, Cage was interested in playing the villain, and his ideas for the character were pretty much exactly what you’d expect. One pitch was to have the bad guy wear prosthetic lips and have his hair tattooed onto his head, while another was to give him a thick Bahamian accent and make him a practitioner of voodoo.
While that’s definitely the sort of thing people would imagine Nicolas Cage to do if given carte blanche to create one of his performances from the ground up, it unsurprisingly didn’t fit the tone of the film. Christoph Waltz was cast instead, and The Green Hornet was about as mediocre as the superhero genre could be, doing decent business at the box office and scoring lukewarm reviews from critics.
The reason he doesn’t like Rogen runs deeper, though, after the 38 year-old revealed in a recent interview that he had another encounter with Cage, who asked him point blank if James Franco had stolen his abandoned Green Hornet ideas and used them to inform his bizarre turn as Alien in Spring Breakers.
“The second part actually just happened before the pandemic,” said Rogen. “I mean, he already doesn’t like me, is the point. So he’ll continue not to like me!”
As well as being overlooked for The Green Hornet, Cage clearly still holds a grudge over what he views as Seth Rogen relaying the information to his close buddy Franco, who then went on to use it as inspiration, but it sounds as though he’s not about to lose any sleep over it.