Filmmaker, actor, and comedian, Seth Rogen, has shared a story about how famed Star Wars creator, George Lucas, thought the world would end in 2012. For decades, Lucas made headlines for his iconic sci-fi franchise, but by 2012, it was his sale of LucasFilm and its properties such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones that created quite a stir.
As for Rogen, the 39-year-old star has enjoyed a steady status as one of comedic filmmaking’s few saving graces. Despite his fame, his work has definitely not resulted in the incredible number of die-hard fans as Lucas’ has. That being said, Rogen has also managed to avoid angering the large number of fans that Lucas has. Aside from the whole incident surrounding the release of 2014’s The Interview, in which Rogen and co-star, James Franco, play two tabloid media personalities sent to North Korean to assassinate dictator Jong-Un Kim, Rogen’s career has been relatively free of controversy. As a result of his immense success and likeability, it’s no surprise that Rogen has rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in Hollywood – including one particularly strange encounter with Lucas.
According to a tweet from the official Culture Crave Twitter account [h/t @ConanOBrien], there was a point where Rogen discovered that Lucas believed that the world would end in 2012. Rogen claims that he asked Lucas if he could join him on his spacecraft, to which the Star Wars legend flatly replied, “No.” The exchange apparently has perplexed Rogen ever since, and the entire tweet can be seen in full below:
In his defense, Lucas wasn’t the only one who believed that the world might end in 2012. The theory that the Maya long-count calendar would expire on December 21, 2012 and therefore meant the end of the world as we knew it, was quite widely held in the lead up to what some were calling “Doomsday.” As a matter of fact, Roland Emmerich got in early on the concept, pedaling his own interpretation of the date with his critically panned 2009 disaster epic, 2012. At the same turn, Rogen also took on an end of the world scenario with his 2013 comedy, This Is the End. That film, of course, didn’t actually focus on the end of the Maya calendar as the source of the destruction. It did, however fare very well at the box office.
All joking aside, it’s unlikely that Lucas actually believed that the world was going to end in 2012. He certainly could have thought it was a possibility, but the addition of the spaceship sounds specifically like a Seth Rogen joke that Lucas responded to in kind. There is perhaps a hint of truth to Lucas believing that the world could end in 2012, however. For him, at least, the Star Wars world he created and built up over the course of an entire career came to an end that year. Lucas didn’t escape via a spaceship, but Star Wars would never be the same again.
Source: Culture Crave [h/t @ConanOBrien]