Even when he’s off duty, Seth Rogen is a man of the people. The 41-year-old actor, comedian, and filmmaker just got back from vacation, which he sheepishly admits was spent exactly where you’d expect. “I, along with the rest of the world, went to Italy,” he tells me with a chuckle over Zoom. “I didn’t know until I got there and then started looking at other people’s Instagrams! It was like, Oh, no, all the people I came here to avoid are in this country!”

In between his latest return to the raunch-com, by way of Apple TV+’s Platonic with Rose Byrne, and his work on this fall’s GameStop-stock movie, Dumb Money, Rogen has been spending his non-focaccia-feasting time on Houseplant, the cannabis brand and home goods purveyor that the actor cofounded back in 2019, out of his now notorious twin passions for pottery and, of course, weed. This summer the company’s line of grown-up, midcentury-mod-globby ceramics includes a new party ashtray; think Le Creuset but for that dream blunt rotation. Now that the recent waves of weed legalization have made marijuana more mainstream than ever, the stoner-comedy legend himself believes this is what the people deserve: to enjoy our weed, and have nice accessories for it too.

In conversation with Vanity Fair, Rogen talks about what’s changed and what hasn’t in smoking culture, plus some wise advice he got about edibles from Snoop Dogg.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: Obviously, weed is getting a huge rebrand now that it’s becoming increasingly legalized. When you think back to your youth, or even when Pineapple Express came out in 2008, could you have ever imagined we’d be here now?

Seth Rogen: I grew up in Vancouver, which was probably on the forefront of a legalized-weed-type situation. It was very normalized. Even when I was a kid, there were a few coffee shops you could smoke weed in. I did imagine dreaming of a world where weed was accepted. Alcohol, I always saw as being so much more dangerous, even as a high school kid. Like, I would drink a lot of alcohol and be throwing up and feel terrible all day the next day. And then I would smoke truly heroic amounts of weed, and nothing! Zero negative side effects!

So the hypocrisy was never lost on me. I always hoped that one day weed would be at least as accepted and as culturally available as alcohol, which you can get at grocery stores; you can order it online from anywhere; you can get it at stadiums. Weed is not even remotely like that, and it’s way less dangerous. I am heartened by the strides it’s made, and that it is more accepted than it used to be. But I still definitely think, as far as its legality goes, it has a very long way to go, you know?

Do you get a sense that weed culture is changing along with the market? There’s certainly a more visible kind of connoisseurship lifestyle going on. Houseplant is a part of that.

It’s good. I think it’s making up for lost time. Weed was so stigmatized—something that people were forced to feel bad about, something that they were told made them stupid. People are reveling in the fact that they can enjoy it. As someone who smokes weed, I never felt like a lot of time, energy, or resources were being put into my lifestyle, especially from a product angle. The idea of validating people’s love of weed, to me, is exciting.

People can finally talk about the different strains they like, and the terps they like, and the ways they like to smoke it, and they do get competitive with one another. I think that’s fine. My whole life, I’ve grown up around people with bars and big displays and martini shakers and wine glasses and all this shit, and it’s like, why does alcohol get to have all that stuff? You know? I like when people are indulging their love of weed and nerding out on it.

Have you spent any time in New York lately? There’s, like, a dispensary on every corner now.

I have! I went into so many smoke shops and bodegas and bought random weed. I’m fascinated by the difference between the institutionalized places and the more mom-and-pop places. What’s cool is that there was very high-end weed available and stuff that essentially seems like it’s being sold to you by the guy behind the counter in a Ziploc bag. Overall, I thought the high availability was heartening. It shouldn’t be hard to get weed.

Do you fuck with the edibles situation at all? That’s a market that’s also really taken off.

Yeah, I fuck with edibles a little bit. But I would do it sparingly, I would say, and generally only if I’m in a situation where it seems like I have to go a long amount of time without smoking. Like, Oppenheimer seems like an ideal edible scenario, if you ask me.

I was talking to Snoop Dogg about edibles once. He also does not eat a lot of edibles, and I asked him why, and he said, “Seth, edibles got no off switch.” And I thought, Great point.

It really is.

You know, you smoke a joint, and you have some sense of how long it’ll last. You eat a brownie, and you’re either not high at all or as high as anyone’s ever been, for 48 hours straight.

Okay, back to smoking. You have a lot covered at Houseplant—ashtrays, grinders, lighters. Are there other smoking accessories you have an eye on? Is there a midcentury-modern bong to be made?

We had a midcentury-like gravity bong we made a long time ago—it was one of our first products. I’ve seen some prototypes of a Houseplant smoking device that we are working on. But yeah, we like to focus on a mix of things that no one else is doing, and maybe just really good versions of things that already exist in the world; there’s a lot of people already making bongs. So our question becomes, how do we make something that stands apart?

I like to watch movies that seem like they’re very well thought-out; I like to listen to music that seems like people put a lot of themselves into it. I like to use products that seem like they were very well considered for the purpose they serve; so that’s always, like, the lens I’m looking at. For something like a bong, it’s hard. Not impossible. Just harder for me to look at it and be like, Are we being additive to this landscape, and not just kind of joining it? You know?

Are you still prototyping on the wheel? How’s the pottery going?

Oh, yes, for sure. We have some stash-jar-type things that are based on things that I've thrown. We have a new shape for an ashtray that’s kind of this undulating shape, directly based on something I threw recently. I do pottery almost every day, and I’m always trying to get better. We’re looking at a sake set, for example, because I got really into throwing sake sets.

Does it bum you out when your fans come to you and say, “Hey, Houseplant’s stuff is too expensive” or “An ashtray shouldn’t cost this much”?

To me, if you really want to buy a cheap ashtray, there is no shortage of places to get one. Our inspiration was to create things that you can’t just buy on Amazon. By nature, we spend a lot of time and energy creating them, and that creates a higher price point.

That being said, I really want to have more affordable products. That’s something that we are very much hard at work on, because I see both sides. I don’t love that a lot of people say that our products are unaffordable. People who want a nice ashtray but who find our highest-end things are out of their price point—I very much want them to also feel as though they can have an ashtray that is thoughtfully designed.

What’s the story behind the new party ashtray?

Well, truthfully, I actually found that, after COVID, a lot of people weren’t sharing their joints as much. And I think now that everyone can buy their own pre-rolls, everyone has their own joints. It used to be we were all sharing a joint at a party, and now it’s like, Oh, I’ll pull out my pre-rolls. But in LA, for sure, and Vancouver, I also find that people more and more travel with the weed that they like to smoke.

Do you think that changes the vibe of said party?

Not to me. I mean, if anything, I’m a little less neurotic about getting a cold sore from someone.

Plus, maybe there’s a little less opportunistic sidling-up-alongside action, hoping for a hit.

Oh, plenty of people still just come up to me and ask if I have weed. Don’t worry. That culture is alive and thriving.

Do people smoke mostly outside still in New York?

It’s tricky. You’re not supposed to do it in parks, for example.

Well, it’s too hot to be outside anyway. It was fun to go to New York and see the thousands and thousands of weed places everywhere. For me, that’s a step in the right direction. Not everyone might see it that way.

Any favorite shops you recommend?

No, not yet. Let me do some more groundwork.

I just remember, I would order weed in New York a long time ago, and it was the cable guy coming between, like, six and midnight. It was a real nightmare. So New York especially, I think, is benefiting from this because, like, I personally wasted collective months on end, waiting in my apartment for some delivery guy to show up. The times are changing!