How Alzheimer’s Brought Seth Rogen to Tears at Cannes

Seth Rogen was sobbing before the credits rolled.

The actor and producer, 44, attended the May 14 Cannes Film Festival premiere of Tangles, an animated film he and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, spent a decade producing. He “was crying a lot throughout the entire thing,” he told People at the after-party. 

He had seen the film many times before. But this was the first time he watched it with a festival audience, rather than on his laptop with Miller Rogen, 43, beside him. The difference, he said, was the crowd.

Finally seeing the completed version with an audience “was a lot more intense,” Rogen told People. In an Instagram reel shared after the screening, the couple were visibly emotional.

Tangles is adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s 2010 graphic memoir about a young illustrator navigating her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. For the Rogens, the story was never just someone else’s. According to Variety, the couple began dating more than two decades ago as Miller Rogen’s mother, Adele, was showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed with younger-onset Alzheimer’s at 55.

“There were so many similarities between my family and Sarah’s family,” Miller Rogen told Variety. “Our moms were both teachers who were diagnosed in their early 50s. I related to the denial, fear and sense of aloneness that can come with a dementia diagnosis.”

Rogen said the film echoed scenes he had lived through himself. “All this stuff we experienced firsthand was reflected in this story,” he told Variety. “I remember being in kitchens or around dining room tables, screaming at people that something was not right here.”

That isolation shaped how the family experienced the disease in real time. In a 2024 AARP interview about their documentary, Taking Care, on her late mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s, Miller Rogen described one early moment of reckoning.

“There’s this moment in the film where she was slamming doors and screaming at nothing,” Miller Rogen told AARP. “It was scary and unnerving, and I felt so alone.”

She said the silence around the disease made everything worse. “If people knew that this was the reality, it wouldn’t be whispered about,” she told AARP. “Everyone would be taking action.”

Part of what prompted the aloneness was her mother’s own wish. “I’d say it’s society’s fault that my mom wanted to keep it a secret,” Miller Rogen told AARP. “She wanted to maintain her independence as much as she could, until she couldn’t.”