Well Intentioned: Seth Rogen Talks Handmade by Seth, Balancing Hollywood With Hobbies, and Why for Him, Weed Is Wellness

September 28, 2022

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From mantras to meditation, mindfulness to manifestation, Well Intentioned offers an intimate look at how to make space for self-care in meaningful ways, big and small.

Seth Rogen is very blonde at the moment. “It’s for a TV show,” he reveals over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, running his hand over a short crop with visible dark roots. “On the show, I play a guy having a midlife crisis, so, sure,” Rogen laughs, spinning a just-rolled joint through his fingers. At 40, the actor, director, writer and producer is approaching middle-age himself, but there doesn’t seem to be any imminent crises on the horizon; if anything, Rogen appears to be thriving. In addition to a number of forthcoming acting projects, including Steven Spielberg’s TIFF-favorite, The Fabelmans—for which the Freaks and Geeks alum is receiving early praise— Rogen became a brand founder last year with the launch of Houseplant, a curated collectsion of cannabis and cannabis-adjacent homewares and accessories, which has also provided a platform for his ceramics passion heard ’round the Internet.

“My journey with pottery and with Houseplant were kind of parallel in a very nice way,” Rogen explains of how the search for nice ashtrays for his own home led to a realization: “It seemed like no one had made a new one in the last 30 years.” As he became more serious about pottery, a pastime his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, put him onto, Rogen started experimenting with ashtray designs and then rolling trays, many of the prototypes of which have become some of Houseplant’s bestsellers. “I couldn’t be happier because the brand was truly born out of what I was already doing.” During the pandemic, a home studio allowed Rogen to hone his throwing and molding skills even further. “Having my own kiln is like a real revelatory thing in terms of learning and experimenting,” he explains of the design freedom that has led to advancements like his “gloopy” glaze technique, which recently beget one of Houseplant’s newest ashtrays (as well as an unexpected viral manicure moment). It has also allowed him to start stockpiling his own work.

“I have a closet full of shit,” Rogen reveals, and while he has spent the last few years gifting these pieces to friends or donating them to charity auctions, he has decided to give the Seth stans what they want: Today, Rogen is dropping Handmade by Seth, four original vases that will be given away to four lucky winners via a raffle on houseplant.com. “I have no desire to hoard these things for myself,” Rogen says of the colorful pieces named for characters from Point Break and Demolition Man (the smallest of the bunch, “Johnny Utah” is a sweet 3” x 2.5” vessel with plenty of versatility). Adds Rogen, “This just seemed like a fun way to get them into people’s hands.” Here, the multi-hyphenate talks about his creative process, vintage-hunting in Palm Springs, and why for him, weed is wellness.

1. Keep Your Brain Busy

I’ve always had a lot of hobbies. Like, I’ve always looked for new creative outlets. I’m someone who had to acknowledge that I do like hanging out and doing nothing and watching television and movies and shit, but I also really like having creative things to engage me. And I like having a lot of different things to engage me when I’m working in the film or television world. I actually enjoy working on a ton of different things at once—it’s helpful to bounce around. I was very into photography for a long time— I think every actor kind of goes through that at some point or another; then I was very into gardening and I started making my own bonsais; I painted for a little while. I always wanted to create tactile art, but really was not that good at it. I am not a good painter, like in a traditional, figurative sense, you know what I mean? It’s like when you’re in art class, you can quickly see the kids who are good and the kids who aren’t, and I was like, not. But my wife had done pottery in high school and every once in a while she would join a studio, and she would be like, “We should go take a class together. I think you would like it.” Then we did, and I loved it and that was really it. We were off to the races. It’s become something that’s really great that we can do together.

2. Make Pottery

Almost all ceramics have some hand-touch to them. They are organic—made of dirt and covered in sand that is heated to turn into glass, essentially. I mean, there’s other things in there, but that’s the core of it. It’s something that’s been around for tens of thousands of years, which is very comforting— and also very singular, which my other jobs are the complete opposite of. I love making movies and television shows, but with that stuff you’ll have this creative thing in your head that you wanna express and you literally need, like, 250 people to do it. Otherwise, you just can’t do it. And that’s really hard! And by nature of that, it’s incredibly expensive, it’s insane and it’s complicated. So it’s nice to do something that is expressive and that seems to get a good response from people. And I can literally do it alone and I don’t need the finances of, like, a major media conglomerate to help execute my vision. The scale is much different as a result but there is something very nice about how simple it is.

Houseplant ashtray set by Seth in moss

$98

HOUSEPLANT

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Houseplant curvy tray

$225

HOUSEPLANT

3. Surround Yourself With Beautiful Things

I kind of fell into design and art through the comic book world and through a bunch of my friends who did graffiti in high school. So I would read, like, Juxtapose magazine and that kind of thing in the nineties and that became a weird backdoor route into high-end art and design in some ways, because a lot of those artists that I started to follow—Faile and Shepard Fairey, and Kaws—kind of then transitioned into that world. So I followed my interest through that and then when we made This Is the End, what was funny is that we built a house—like the whole thing was in this house, and me and my writing and directing partner, Evan [Goldberg] got really into the furniture, and the furniture design, and the fixtures, and the lighting and the materials, and all of a sudden, that was kind of the first time I unabashedly gave myself permission to really like this stuff in a lot of ways. That movie really was actually the thing that led me to indulge in it. But I’ve always collectsed stuff. I think it’s probably a Jewish trauma that I’ve inherited. We probably have the instinct to keep as many things as possible, because…you never know! So, when I like a thing, it is my instinct to get as much of it as I can. Collecting comic books kind of transitioned to these Japanese vinyl toys, and then I was trying to get nice ashtrays for my own home and I started going online and buying vintage ashtrays. Smoking cigarettes has gone out of fashion, but when something is popular, it draws creative minds, and in the ’60s and ’50s and before that, all of these great creative minds and architects and designers were designing ashtrays. That’s definitely one of the thought processes that inspired what we are doing with Houseplant. I’m not above any second-hand ashtray reseller. I’ve gone to all of them online and I physically go to vintage and antique stores. I’ve found some great ones in Palm Springs. I think I have over 600 now.

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Juxtapoz Magazine 1996 Vol. 2 #3

$15

EBAY

Super7 Japanese vinyl Mummy Boy

$85

SUPER7

Just Vintage La Solana ashtray

$25

ETSY

4. Smoke Weed

Smoking weed is so culturally acceptable now, thank God, in most of the country, not enough of it, but most of it. I’m from Vancouver where it’s very, very acceptable. Everyone smoked weed when I was growing up and I’ve been smoking since I was 13 years old, which is not necessarily something I recommend! [Laughs.] But it’s been well documented for me. Now, I just smoke weed all day, every day and I love it. And thank God it’s out there because it seems to be what I need. I know weed works for me. You’ll have a very hard time getting me to go somewhere I can’t smoke weed at this point in my life because it doesn’t seem reasonable to me [laughs]. I’ve equated it to, like, wearing glasses or shoes. It is just a thing I do to make my journey through the day more navigable. Could I go through my day without glasses or shoes? Yeah. Would it be much worse? For sure. That’s really how I view it.

5. Keep Family Close

My wife is incredibly influential on any creative thing I’m ever doing because I just talk to her about all of it, all the time, and she has great taste and opinions. I would actually like to find a way to maybe convince her to let [Houseplant] make a version of these really cool vases she does! There are some things we’ve kind of made together where it’s like, she threw it and I trimmed it or something like that, or I glazed it and she designed it. But we haven’t done anything “official” together. We talk about it, though, and we should do it. We’re open to a collab, sure. We work well together—and with our dog. She’s a Cavalier King Charles spaniel and she just turned 13 the other day. She’s so grumpy and slow now, but it’s wonderful. We actually molded a lighter off of her. She’s a real inspiration to all of us. [Laughs.]

Houseplant Zelda lighter caddy

$100

COMING SOON