Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne face off against Zac Efron and a wild college fraternity in Neighbors. The stars of the comedy spoke a bit about the film and their experiences on set. Efron in particular said he could relate to Teddy —his obsessive frat leader character.
“The second I heard about Teddy, I knew this guy,” Efron shared. “I knew how to harness the brother-camaraderie thing to the point where it kind of makes you crazy. That was the cool part of Teddy that I really understood.”
Rogen didn’t think it was mandatory for an actor to be able to directly relate to a character, though he did acknowledge that most of his projects have held some degree of familiarity with him.
“Even with This Is the End, which was ridiculous —there was a personal element to it,” said Rogen.
While shooting Neighbors, the cast members developed great chemistry — but there were few off-camera hijinks, according to Rogen. “Thank God no one pranked anybody,” Rogen said. “Whenever I hear those stories I think ‘What a f——- nightmare!'”
“Seth took his shirt off —I didn’t know that was going to happen,” Efron said with a laugh.
And Rose Byrne gets her own fair share of the laughs —providing some much needed estrogen to the boys behaving badly premise. “She was so funny and continues to be so funny, those scenes were so much fun to do,” said Rogen. “We were a good team in the movie.”
“We wanted to not make her the usual stock female character—the nagging wife in the corner,” Byrne said. “We tried to make her as irresponsible and irreverent as the rest of the cast.”
Rogen also admitted that he has some real-life not-so-great neighbors. The guy who lives next to the actor apparently is getting on his nerves.
“He’s been building a house for the last two years; starts at 7:30 in the morning every day. And he’s an a–hole about it,” Rogen shared. “He knows I don’t like him. We argue a lot. My method of dealing with it is I scream at him every three months and it makes me feel a little bit better.”
“It does nothing as far as the progress of the house goes,” Rogen added.
