Los Angeles—Can you be the poster boy for losers and then turn yourself into a comic-book superhero? Seth Rogen thinks he can. Rogen, who famously helped to promote the film Knocked Up through a poster of himself that featured the caption ‘What if this guy got you pregnant?’, is getting ready to play the Green Hornet.

During interviews for the August release Pineapple Express, which he cowrote and in which he costars with James Franco, Rogen said that the only reference most people have to the Green Hornet is a 1960s TV show that is best remembered for its sidekick.

“When you mention The Green Hornet to people they say ‘Bruce Lee played Kato in that show.’ We [he and writing partner and fellow Vancouver native Evan Goldberg] have always wanted to make ‘a hero and his sidekick movie’, so when we heard Green Hornet was up for grabs we felt that could be the most perfect way to do the story, because he is the only hero whose sidekick is more known than he is. We kind of thought it would be a good way of telling this relationship story and do a crazy action movie.”

Rogen says that the other reaction he gets when he talks about the film is surprise that he intends to play the hero. (According to the film website www.imdb.com/, veteran Hong Kong actor Stephen Chow will play Kato.) However, he says that getting the writing assignment was more difficult.

“I think I can do the role,” he says. “We have written the script and we even have a release date. It’s June 25, 2010 so mark your calendars. We started writing the script when we were making this movie [Pineapple Express] and we found it was really helpful because you can figure out how specific you can or can’t be when you are writing the action scenes. This movie also helped us to get The Green Hornet writing job because we were able to show the script from it when we were pitching. We said ‘Look, we can write action scenes.’”

Rogen says that while both Superbad and Pineapple Express were given R-ratings by US classifier MPAA, he expects that The Green Hornet will be rated PG13 because the language will be somewhat less foul.

“Fortunately, violence is fine with the MPAA. When we were writing the script for The Green Hornet we didn’t have too many situations where we said ‘you know what would make this scene better? If Kato said cocksucker.’ That didn’t come up too many times.”

For more on Seth Rogen, read Ian Caddell's 2007 interview with him in the Straight article Point Grey writ Super large.