On August 6, Seth Rogen’s new comedy,
An American Pickle, will have the honour of being the first original feature film to stream on the new HBO Max platform. The film is built around a fantastical (and pretty funny) premise: an early 20th century Jewish immigrant falls into a barrel of pickles, is preserved for 100 years, and wakes up in modern-day Brooklyn (having not aged a day) to come face to face with his own great-grandson. Rogen plays both the great-grandfather and the great-grandson. In addition to taking on the movie’s two leads, the actor also had to reach back to his family’s roots and learn Yiddish for the project.“Yiddish was spoken in my household. My grandparents spoke Yiddish,” said Rogen in a Q&A following the film’s online premiere (via
Variety). “They mostly swore in Yiddish and said terrible things to one another that they didn’t want me to understand. Yiddish was, largely, a language based on profanity and insulting other family members.”His second-hand knowledge of the language, however, didn’t mean that reciting lines in Yiddish came easily. “I had heard [Yiddish] my whole life, but I did not know it,” he explained, adding “I did have to learn it, basically phonetically, for the movie. It’s a really hard language to learn.” But for Rogen, the connection to the story ran deeper than the familiar language he’d heard growing up. It also reminded him of his own Jewish grandparents. “I couldn’t have related to it more,” he said. “My grandfather was a tough man. He borderline tolerated me at best as my grandfather. If we were the same age, he definitely would have beaten the living s#*t out of me,” joked Rogen.
SNL and
Miracle Workers writer Simon Rich adapted the briny tale for the big screen from his own previously published short story, explaining that the inspiration was drawn from his “experience growing up as the descendant of some incredibly hard-working, disciplined Eastern European Jews, who immigrated to the U.S. with pennies in their pocket and had all sorts of insane hardships that they overcame.” The new movie version also stars
Succession’s Sarah Snook.Rogen recently shared the trailer for
An American Pickle on his Instagram account. Check it out below.
[video_embed id='1927485']Before you go: Ryan Reynolds, Seth Rogen and other Canadian celebrities call for physical distancing[/video_embed]
