The actor-producer opens up to PEOPLE about ‘Tangles,’ which follows a woman navigating her mother's Alzheimer's disease
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NEED TO KNOW
- Seth and Lauren Miller Rogen are among the producers of Tangles, a new animated film about Alzheimer’s disease that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14
- Seth shares with PEOPLE at the premiere’s after-party that he “was crying a lot throughout the entire thing”
- The Emmy winner and his wife have a personal connection to the Sarah Leavitt graphic memoir the film is based on, as Lauren’s late mother Adele was diagnosed with genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s disease
Seth Rogen is wearing his heart on his sleeve at the Cannes Film Festival.
Tangles, the actor-filmmaker's new animated movie about Alzheimer's disease, left not a dry eye in the house during its Thursday, May 14 premiere at the French fest. At the after-party at Lucia Cannes, Seth, 44 — who is both a producer and voice actor on the project — tells PEOPLE he “was crying a lot throughout the entire thing.”
“I've seen the movie, obviously, a lot of times,” says the Emmy winner, who produced Tangles alongside wife Lauren Miller Rogen. “But that was the first time I've seen it not on my laptop computer with Lauren sitting beside me in our living room.”
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Directed by Leah Nelson, Tangles is based on Sarah Leavitt's 2010 graphic memoir Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me. Its voice cast includes Seth, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein, Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, Samira Wiley, Wanda Sykes, Adam Shapiro and Bowen Yang.
Finally seeing the “completely finished” version of the film with a crowd “was a lot more intense,” Seth tells PEOPLE. The creator-star of The Studio was seen wiping away tears in videos shared to social media from inside the premiere screening during a rousing standing ovation.
“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.”
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Lauren, 44, previously joined her husband in producing the 2025 documentary Taking Care, which followed their journey in caring for Lauren's late mother Adele, who was diagnosed with genetic early-onset Alzheimer's disease at age 55. The couple has been vocal about their experiences with the disease.
Helping Nelson and Leavitt bring Tangles to the screen was “difficult in some ways,” Seth tells PEOPLE. But ultimately, it's “much easier to take ownership over the subject matter if you have a personal connection to it."
"And I think it makes you able to push creative boundaries a little bit more if you feel comfort with the subject matter," he continues. "Which we do, unfortunately.”
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Leavitt, whose autobiographical source material inspired the movie, calls the premiere an “incredible” experience. “Every time I watch that film, it's like seeing it for the first time,” the writer tells PEOPLE. “We were all crying. It was such a mixture of intense emotions all at the same time.”
Seth and Lauren, who have been married since 2011, walked the Cannes carpet with the cast and crew of Tangles. The couple also founded Hilarity for Charity in 2012 for Alzheimer's awareness. Through the nonprofit they've frequently held events with comedians and musicians to raise money to fight the disease.
Among Lauren's upcoming screen projects is writing and directing Babies, starring Seth, Sharon Stone and Anna Kendrick. In addition to The Studio season 2, Seth will appear in director-star Olivia Wilde's The Invite (in theaters June 26) and the Kristen Stewart-led The Wrong Girls (in theaters Aug. 14).
Tangles does not yet have a distributor or release date.
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