"Emma Watson just dove in hard and improv-ed like the guys"

Emma Watson, aka Hermione from the Harry Potter movies, shows up and steals supplies from James Franco and his friends, in the latest trailer for This is the End. But how did Rogen and his co-director/co-writer Evan Goldberg coax a crazy comedy performance out of Watson? And what sort of humor was going too far for this apocalyptic movie? We asked them, and they told us.

So how hard was it to bring out the weirdo in Emma Watson? And how weird was it working with Rihanna?

Rogen: The answer for both was, not very.

Goldberg: The thing was, once you got to the set, there was like ten of us. And there’s a vibe when you have ten different actors who are all working together, and all the producers all knew the actors. So you kind of like were coming to a summer camp that was already in session, and they just kind of slid right into it.

Rogen: Emma thought it was super funny what we were doing, and she was really funny. And Rihanna was awesome. She was great. She improvised. She did some stuntwork that she didn’t think she was going to be doing. [Laughs] And it was great. It was really easy. There were some days where I looked around, and there’s like 20 movie stars on the set right now, and everyone was kind of coexisting in a great way. It was almost like no-one wanted to be the asshole, because there were so many people there that you didn’t want to be the one who was the fucking asshole.

Goldberg: Hearing you say that, I’m picturing one of them acting up, and it would have been a disaster for them. Everybody would have just zoned in on them.

Emma Watson, though, seems to have less of a comedy background than most of the people in the movie. How did she adjust?

Goldberg: She definitely, for the first half of her first scene, was unsure of how it was going to go. But once she got it, she just dove in hard, and was improv-ing like the rest of the guys, and doing all of that good stuff.

Rogen: And she’s like… one of her jokes in the movie is like, so funny, and it’s a pretty edgy joke. And it’s awesome, how she played it.

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