Rogen enlists famous pals to poke fun at themselves in apocalypse film

TORONTO – There’s something very satisfying about watching cocky celebrities get their just desserts.

Such is the thinking of actor-filmmaker Seth Rogen, who admits to finding delight in the torment of Hollywood’s privileged elite in his latest comedy “This Is The End.”

The whole premise revolves around a mystifying attack that befalls Los Angeles — one that apparently levels its most punishing assaults on some of film and TV’s more famous faces.

“It was fun to write,” Rogen admits during a recent stop in Toronto with co-writer and co-director Evan Goldberg.

“We really kill a lot of people and the whole time we’re like, ‘Man, I hope people think this is funny!’ Because to us, this is very entertaining.”

Rogen, who also stars in the meta-horror-comedy, enlisted famous pals Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson to play outrageous versions of themselves caught in a wild night of end-of-the-world mayhem.

Gruesome punishments also befall singer Rihanna, “Harry Potter”‘s Emma Watson, movie star Paul Rudd, heart-throb Channing Tatum and TV comics Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari.

Throughout the pandemonium, well-worn stereotypes that dog each celeb are laid bare and exaggerated for better or for worse: here, Rogen is a cowardly pothead, Hill is an arrogant narcissist, Baruchel is a condescending hipster and Franco is a sexually ambiguous art snob.

“I don’t know if anyone really knew what to expect,” Rogen admits of openly mocking his Hollywood pals.

“I think they could see what we were doing as soon as they read it — that we were all playing like bad versions of ourselves. (But) I remember Franco, like, pulling me aside early on and just being like, ‘You don’t actually think I’m like this, right?’ “

Rogen says he and Goldberg, who also co-wrote “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express,” prepared their friends before unleashing the script on them.

Certain people definitely had sensitive issues that they weren’t comfortable putting up on the big screen, notes Goldberg.

“You never know what it is,” says Goldberg. “Everyone has like a surprise thing that they’re sensitive about and every blue moon you’ll hit that button and they’ll tell you, ‘That’s my button.'”

But being friends definitely helped things move smoothly, says Rogen, who met Goldberg as a kid in bar mitzvah class.

“When you’re friends they can ask things of you as the director that they probably wouldn’t ask of another director that wasn’t friends with them. But I also think you as the director can ask things of them that you wouldn’t ask of an actor who you weren’t friends with. It’s a give and take.”

When it came to their final moments on screen, the stars definitely had opinions on how they wanted to go.

“Jason Segel had like three different version of death he wanted to do,” says Goldberg.

“Mindy (Kaling) really wanted to scream, she was very proud of her scream,” adds Rogen.

It was always open for anyone to throw any idea out there, especially dialogue and improv’d bits. But the action had to be planned out very carefully since it included a lot of complicated computer-generated effects, says Rogen.

“The Green Hornet” star is proud to note they pulled together the apocalyptic spectacle for $31 million — a relative bargain for sci-fi thrillers, and less than the cost of his Katherine Heigl romantic comedy “Knocked Up.”

Rogen and Goldberg say they are already working on their next co-directing project, a more political venture set in North Korea that will also reunite Rogen on screen with his “Pineapple Express” co-star, Franco.

“It’s something we actually didn’t write,” says Goldberg. “It was too political and we knew we weren’t smart enough so we found another guy named Dan Sterling who’s smarter than us to write it.”

Rogen says “The Interview” will be shot in Vancouver.

“This Is the End” opens Wednesday.