Seth Rogen is known for keeping his feelings under wraps, but at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his new animated film Tangles, the actor couldn’t keep the emotion from bubbling over as the movie played.
During the Thursday, May 14 screening in France, the atmosphere in the room was visibly heavy, with plenty of the audience moved to tears — including Rogen, who found himself emotional from start to finish.
Reflecting on the experience and admitting he was ‘crying a lot throughout the entire thing’, Rogen told PEOPLE: “I’ve seen the movie, obviously, a lot of times. But that was the first time I’ve seen it not on my laptop computer with Lauren sitting beside me in our living room.”
Co-produced with his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, the film adapts Sarah Leavitt’s 2010 graphic memoir Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me.
Rogen explained that watching the fully completed version with a full festival crowd hit far harder than he expected, and underscored just how much time and care went into bringing it to life over the years.
“I’m just glad the movie is effective and works. We’ve been working on it for like 10 years,” he adds. “To watch it with a big group of people is a very lovely feeling. And that it seems to have emotionally impacted them, it’s very nice.”
The project also carries deep personal weight for the couple. Lauren, 44, and Rogen previously produced the 2025 documentary Taking Care, which followed her experience supporting her late mother Adele, who lived with early onset Alzheimers before she died.
Rogen acknowledged that returning to such a familiar and painful topic wasn’t always easy. Still, he said the closeness to the subject also made it simpler to commit to telling the story honestly and with intention.
“And I think it makes you able to push creative boundaries a little bit more if you feel comfort with the subject matter,” he added. ”Which we do, unfortunately.”
Leavitt, whose memoir inspired the film, was just as moved by the debut. She described the premiere as surreal, saying it still doesn’t feel familiar even after repeated viewings. “Every time I watch that film, it’s like seeing it for the first time,” the writer explained. “We were all crying. It was such a mixture of intense emotions all at the same time.”
The film boasts an extensive voice lineup, with Rogen joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein, Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, Samira Wiley, Wanda Sykes, Adam Shapiro and Bowen Yang. It was directed by Leah Nelson, a relatively under-the-radar filmmaker now drawing significant attention with her Cannes arrival.
Tangles has not yet secured distribution or a release date, meaning audiences eager to see it will likely have to wait a while before it reaches cinemas or streaming.