It’s been 15 years since Superbad was released and high school friendships around the world were changed forever. Suddenly, it was okay to be a nerd as long as you had a super nice best friend by your side who would get a really bad fake ID with you and almost get arrested while buying a specific brand of vodka for your crush. High school, man!
Though it might seem like everyone involved in making the classic early 2000s comedy was really close, that wasn’t the case. During the audition process, things were not so friendly between Jonah Hill and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played Seth and the mononymous icon McLovin.
“Jonah immediately hated [Christopher]. He was like, ‘That was f*cking with my rhythm. I couldn’t perform with that guy,'” Seth Rogen explained in a new Vanity Fair piece celebrating the movie’s 15th anniversary.
It seems like that was the goal, as producer Judd Apatow told Hill that he wasn’t supposed to like him. “Jonah said, ‘I don’t like that guy. I don’t want him doing it.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly why we’re hiring him. It couldn’t be more perfect. The fact that it bothers you is exactly what we want.'” Apatow said that at his third callback audition, Mintz-Plasse was getting on his nerves, just as his character would. “[He] attacked Jonah and did improvs insulting Jonah.”
Mintz-Plasse ended up getting the role, even though he didn’t think he was going to. ” I was just, like, a scrawny kid. I was super stoked to be there. I had Seth and everyone sign my script because I didn’t think I was going to get the part.” It seems like being annoying in his first audition ever certainly paid off for him.
