Seth Rogen Live-Tweets While Watching Cats Stoned
According to Seth Rogen, the best way to watch Cats is all hopped up on human catnip.
The actor — who shot even further into mainstream fame after starring on Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks by playing lovable stoners in films like Knocked Up and Pineapple Express — recently partook in a bit of recreational marijuana usage and thought it an excellent idea to watch one of the worst movies of 2019. In Rogen's own words, he got "pretty stoned" and started watching Cats. And then he decided to live-tweet the experience.
Director Tom Hooper's live-action-slash-CGI adaptation of the famed Broadway show of the same name, Cats is nearly universally loathed — regarded as "oddly over-sexualized," "inscrutable and ignominious — a veritable cat-astrophe," and "somehow worse than you imagined it could ever be." Rogen admitted to having never seen the Broadway version of Cats, itself a loose adaptation of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, but he undoubtedly heard all the fuss about the film — which garnered terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and became the subject of relentless tormenting online, despite it featuring a star-studded cast to tell the tale of a group of cats known as the Jellicles on the night they must choose which feline will die and be reborn.
Obviously, Rogen figured he should witness the disaster that is Cats for himself — and heighten the experience with his drug of choice.
Seth Rogen's Cats commentary is purr-fectly hilarious
In the initial tweet that kicked off the Twitter thread of Rogen's Cats commentary, the actor expressed confusion: "It is truly trippy. Am I supposed to know what a Jellicle is? They've said it 200,000 times but I don't know what's happening." Rogen then revealed that he had watched the behind-the-scenes features, presumably before diving into the actual movie, during which he learned some puzzling information. "The scale is bizarre. The behind the scenes features, which are amazing, said the set is 2.5 times scale but that would mean cats are like 60 pounds in real life!" he tweeted, adding in a follow-up tweet, "These cats are like 2 feet tall in this world. That's a huge f******* cat."
From there came a string of chuckle-worthy tweets that documented Rogen's increasing bewilderment about what was playing out in front of him. From all-caps perplexity over what exactly a Jellicle is to whether the Cats team "commission[ed] little chucks from the cat shoe maker" to suspicion about the set design, his live-tweeting of the film had range, emotion, and, most importantly, Rogen's signature sense of humor.
"This is so 'Broadway funny.' Some cats in pants. Some no pants. 'Let's make 35 nonsense songs introducing cats!' – The makers of Cats. They move so funny. Jason Derulo's feet don't look like they're touching the ground. Judi Dench is in a cat fur coat which I can only assume is socially APPALLING in this world," Rogen wrote back to back in a series of tweets.
He continued, "I have a hard time getting actors to rehearse for like 20 mins. They got these people to train to lick their hands and rub them in their hair for weeks!!! [...] Their tales are dancing. CG cat people dancing is odd. Is it impressive? I don't know! [...] Is the milk bar for humans??! For cats? Is this in Clockwork Orange world? Huh?"
The Cats madness continues on Seth Rogen's Twitter
Rogen went on to dub Judi Dench, who plays the wizened but wise cat Old Deuteronomy, as "the most cuddly" of all the mostly-horrifying-looking human-cat creatures featured in the film. Later during his stoned viewing of Cats, Rogen posited to his fans two important questions: "Is magic cat a thing?" and "Why even make these actors show up on set? They're playing cats."
He also made the astute observation that "cats love to mess up a made bed," couldn't stop being half-impressed, half-amused at the introduction of increasingly odd cats, and pondered "how many times they say the word 'cat'" in the movie. Rogen then mentioned Cats actor Idris Elba, who plays the mystically powered antagonist Macavity in the flick, and subtly referenced his recent coronavirus diagnosis: "Out of respect, I'll leave Idris out of all this."
At the end of it all, Rogen's marijuana-infused descent into Cats madness was seemingly the result of him practicing self-isolation during the coronavirus pandemic that continues to sweep the globe. Though the actor couldn't stick Cats out for its full runtime, deciding to turn it off and watch the reality TV show 90 Day Fiancé instead, Rogen did have time to remind the Twitter-verse of the most important rule to follow during the COVID-19 outbreak: "Stay clean as f***."
If a dude who endured mind-melting Cats mania while under the influence can remember to be clean, so can you. So listen to Rogen, lest you want to ascend to the Heaviside Layer — or, worse yet, be subjected to the NSFW cut of Cats that fans and celebs (including Rogen) have been crying out for. We're shuddering into another dimension just thinking about it.