You may have heard Judd Apatow’s recent talk show reveal that it was none other than Seth Rogen who first informed Tom Cruise that one could watch porn on the internet. It’s true, said Rogen — and it’s one of a few bizarre details that came out of the encounter. While attending the Hollywood premiere of the Netflix film Like Father, which was written and directed by his wife Lauren Miller Rogen and features the comedian in a supporting role, Rogen confirmed to Vulture that the meeting with Cruise went down the way Apatow described it.
“I didn’t remember that until I heard Judd tell that story,†Rogen chuckled. “I obviously had no recollection of that, and then when I saw him tell it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah! I told Tom Cruise that internet pornography exists, and he didn’t know.’ Which is crazy!†And Rogen thinks he told him as much. “I probably was like, ‘This is crazy you don’t know this.’ I mean, I can’t remember — it was like 12 years ago or something like that. I think generally my reaction was, ‘You are a very sheltered man.’â€
But there are other details of the meeting that Rogen does still remember quite clearly. “That day in Tom Cruise’s driveway, I got to his house, and I had to pee so bad,†he revealed. “I very vividly remember this, and he has a very long, winding driveway, and I didn’t want to show up at his house and just pee right away, because I thought it would be an awkward thing,†he said. “So as I was driving up his driveway, I stopped halfway through it and peed in a Snapple bottle I had in my car. And then sealed it up and finished the ride up the driveway, and greeted Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and his newborn baby, Suri.â€
“It also, contextually, was the weirdest time to be meeting Tom Cruise,†he added. “It was like the weirdest frenzy — it was like a couple weeks after the couch-jumping thing. So it was Peak Tom Cruise.†That was the moment in time when Cruise and Holmes’s seemingly curious romance dominated the tabloids and the mainstream press, and his hyperkinetic appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk-show sofa proclaiming his love in literal leaps and bounds went notoriously viral. “It was right when the baby was born, and no one had seen a picture of it yet, so literally there was a debate whether or not she was real.â€
The baby, he discovered, was very real. “I met the baby … I pulled in the driveway and he’s like, ‘Here’s [Suri].’ I held her. It was just, like, instantaneous.â€
The discussed project never came to pass, and Rogen has only encountered Cruise fleetingly since — but also memorably. “We blew him up on Preacher, and he didn’t like that,†he said, recalling an episode of the profanely amusing AMC horror-comedy series he produces in which a fictional Cruise, leading a flock of presumed Scientologists, explodes and dies after a supernatural entity attempts to bond with him. “There were some calls exchanged.â€
The Cruise porn anecdote surfaced the same week that Rolling Stone reported on another eccentric, decade-plus-old encounter in which Rogen’s neighbor Kanye West dropped by unannounced with an invitation to shoot some hoops, which Rogen politely declined.
“I’ve been here forever, that’s what I’m starting to realize,†Rogen said. “I’ve just lived in Los Angeles a really long time at this point, so you accumulate stories over the years … I’m like Forrest Gump.â€