Featurette for An American Pickle breaks down VFX behind doubling Seth Rogen

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Throughout the history of cinema, we've seen the same actor play multiple characters on screen many times, and the latest use of this effect is showcased in AN AMERICAN PICKLE. Although the effect is relatively simple to pull off these days, it still needs a great deal of attention in order to pull it off flawlessly, but AN AMERICAN PICKLE threw a wrench into the works due to Seth Rogen's beard.

The HBO Max film finds Seth Rogen playing dual roles, that of Herschel Greenbaum and his great-grandson Ben Greenbaum. While playing Herschal, Rogen sported a big bushy beard, but because the actor hates how fake beards look on screen, he grew a real one. This meant that director Brandon Trost had to shoot all of the scenes with Herschal first, and only then did Rogen shave his beard to play Ben. When shooting a split-screen effect, you'd typically want to get both sides shot as quickly as possible in order to ensure that lighting and camera movement was consistent, but with AN AMERICAN PICKLE, there were days or weeks between shooting both sides of the scene. HBO Max has released a new featurette for the film, which dives into how they pulled off the effects.

The official synopsis for AN AMERICAN PICKLE:

AN AMERICAN PICKLE, directed by Brandon Trost, is based on Simon Rich’s New Yorker novella and stars Seth Rogen as Herschel Greenbaum, a struggling laborer who immigrates to America in 1920 with dreams of building a better life for his beloved family. One day, while working at his factory job, he falls into a vat of pickles and is brined for 100 years. The brine preserves him perfectly and when he emerges in present-day Brooklyn, he finds that he hasn’t aged a day. But when he seeks out his family, he is troubled to learn that his only surviving relative is his great-grandson, Ben Greenbaum (also played by Rogen), a mild-mannered computer coder whom Herschel can’t even begin to understand.

AMERICAN PICKLE is now available to stream on HBO Max, so be sure to check out a review from our own Alex Maidy.