Actor Blows Chance To Voice Yoda In ‘Star Wars’ Reboot
Seth Rogen is currently doing the press rounds for “The Green Hornet” and, while we’ve already learnt that the film isn’t much cop, Rogen always gives good interview, and a chat with the Toronto Sun (via Movieline) has turned up a doozy of a story about Rogen’s encounter with a geek demi-god, one that confirms something that most of us have suspected for a very long time: George Lucas is out of his goddamn mind.
Rogen tells of how he was in a meeting which was joined by Lucas and Steven Spielberg, one which seems to have left him with a somewhat different impression of his idols. The actor relates, “George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for about 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it. He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like ‘My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry…'”
Of course, Rogen’s a smart guy, and tried to use his new contacts to escape the devestation, John Cusack-style: “I first thought he was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious and then I started thinking, ‘If you’re George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there’s no way you haven’t built a spaceship for yourself… So I asked him… ‘Can I have a seat on it?’ He claimed he didn’t have a spaceship, but there’s no doubt there’s a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go… It’s gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I’ll be blown up like the rest of us.”
Not only is it pretty funny stuff, but it also explains an enormous amount about George Lucas — if the Spielberg/Lucas dynamic described here alone is true, it makes the final product of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” make all kinds of sense. Rogen may have burned some bridges among the most powerful people, but we’re certainly glad he’s shared his encounter with the rest of the world.
The good news is, if Lucas is correct, we’ll be spared the planned 3D re-releases of “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.” The bad news is, “The Phantom Menace” 3D version, set for release next spring, will still sneak in under the wire. But we wouldn’t start fretting unnecessarily: Lucas hasn’t been right about anything in 30 years, and it’s unlikely that he’d start now, particularly with the fate of the world at stake. Also, for a man worried about tectonic plates? Maybe Marin County isn’t the ideal choice of location for Lucasfilm…