Seth Rogen has clarified reports about Emma Watson walking off the set of This Is The End, due to the outrageous content of one of its scenes.
In 2013, Seth co-directed and co-wrote the star-studded disaster comedy, which sees a number of celebrities playing themselves as they deal with the end of the world.
The Harry Potter star was supposed to have been involved in a scene that featured Channing Tatum being led around on a dog leash while sporting a thong, while Danny McBride led a group of cannibals.
Reports after the film was released claimed the sequence proved too much for Emma, who decided she couldn’t be involved and walked off set, although she did appear in other scenes and helped promote the film when it was released.
Asked about the rumours during an interview with GQ magazine, Seth said: “I don’t look back on that and think: ‘How dare she do that?’ You know? I think sometimes when you read something, when it comes to life it doesn’t seem to be what you thought it was.
“But it was not some terrible ending to our relationship. She came back the next day to say goodbye. She helped promote the film.
“No hard feelings, and I couldn’t be happier with how the film turned out in the end.”
“She was probably right,” Seth added. “It was probably funnier the way we ended up doing it.”
HuffPost UK has contacted Emma Watson’s publicist for comment.
Although he didn’t name anyone directly, actor James Franco previously alluded to the incident in Interview magazine.
He said: “The movie is a comedy, but it’s kind of an outrageous one, and this actress—I won’t say who, but she had a smaller role in the film—walked off the movie in the middle of a scene.”
James continued: “I’ll admit that the scene we were doing was pretty crazy. There’s not any nudity, but it is pretty outrageous. It’s not as if the scene wasn’t in the script, though.
“In any case, I didn’t see any of this go down, but I guess she basically went up to the directors, Seth and Evan [Goldberg], and said, ‘I don’t think I can do this’. She, by the way, didn’t have to do anything crazy in the scene. But what was going on around her was, I guess, too extreme for her.
“So Seth was like, ‘Well, what can we do to fix it?’. And she said, ‘There’s nothing you can do to fix it. It’s just everything’. And he said, ‘Well, let’s just shoot it and I promise you can come to the editing room, and, if you don’t like what we’ve cut together, then we will not put it in the movie’. And she said, ‘No, that’s still not good. I just can’t do this. I can’t be here’. And he said, ‘Do you want to leave?’. And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to leave’.”
Read Seth’s interview in full in the May issue of British GQ available via digital download and on newsstands Thursday 1st April.