Seth Rogen on Sony Hack: "Everyone Is Doing Exactly What These Criminals Want"

"The Interview" co-stars Rogen and James Franco elaborated to Howard Stern on the film and the cyberattack

Seth Rogen and James Franco talked about the Sony hack with Howard Stern on Monday and criticized the media for giving the hackers "exactly what these criminals want" by writing about leaked information.

The stars of Sony’s The Interview visited SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show to promote their film, which has been in the spotlight since a hacker group calling itself Guardians of Peace started releasing internal studio documents on Nov. 24. The group has revealed the duo’s paychecks for the film and demanded the movie not be released.

In The Interview, Rogen and Franco’s characters are charged with assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a storyline that upset the country's government leaders and led to them calling upon the United Nations to stop its release. The film opens Dec. 25.

The dictator wasn't the film's original target, Rogen told Stern on Friday. It was the government leader's father, Kim Jong Il. After the elder Kim died in December 2011, the script was recast to include the son.

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The trio said the media is giving the hackers just what they want by reporting on the content of Sony's internal files. “Everyone is doing exactly what these criminals want," Rogen said, comparing the media to a pawn shop that works as a fence for organized crime.

Franco questioned how Sony can stop its movies from being distributed online but not its internal documents, to which Rogen answered, “It’s stolen information that media outlets are directly profiting from." Stern asked Franco if he was embarrassed by the disclosure of his $6.5 million paycheck for The Interview. Franco called it "one of the bigger checks that I get" but said his time was worth the money. Rogen said both of their Interview salaries were "a stupid amount of money, but it’s all relative to how much [the studios] are making off of it.”