| Ryan Orange/LA Weekly. |
| Seth Rogan. |
Sony assumed North Korea would hate the movie. The question was: What would it do? Pyongyang had just tested its atom bomb and threatened “preemptive nuclear attack.” And the Supreme Leader with his finger on the trigger was barely over 30, with less than two years of experience.
But Kim Jong-un didn’t care about Olympus Has Fallen, even though the violently anti-North Korean 2013 film showed his people strangling women, murdering unarmed men, kidnapping the U.S. president and even executing their fellow citizens. His saber rattlers never mentioned it. That wasn’t worth a fight.
A year later, North Korea had a bigger enemy: Seth Rogen.
In the new film The Interview, which Rogen directed with longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg, he plays a trash-TV producer named Aaron who’s become bored with pop culture gossip. Then he and his bimbo host, Dave Skylark (James Franco), score an interview with Kim Jong-un (Randall Park).
There’s a catch and a twist: First, a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) commands Aaron and Dave to assassinate Kim Jong-un for the good of the world. Second, Skylark and Kim Jong-un instantly hit it off and spend the trip cruising in tanks listening to Katy Perry, banging chicks at orgies and bonding over the pressures of media scrutiny and disapproving parents. Sighs Kim Jong-un, “You know what’s more destructive than a nuclear bomb? Words.”
LA Weekly has the full story and interview with Rogan.