First Look: In ‘Babies,’ Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick Stare Down Parenthood

A happily married couple, Aaron (Rogen) and Annie (Kendrick), welcome a close friend (Kate Berlant) and her young daughter into their home when she and her husband decide to separate. They see the realities of parenthood up close, all while Annie’s mother sees her Alzheimer’s worsen and Annie’s grief-stricken father (David Strathairn) struggles with his changing reality. At the same time, Annie and another friend (Issa Rae), a mother herself, try to open their dream business together. Tick tock, says the biological clock, and Aaron and Annie feel pressure to decide what their family will look like in the future. Does it include a baby?

Plenty of the film’s story elements are inspired by real life: About 11 years ago, one of Miller Rogen and Rogen’s friends really did move in with them for about a year, her toddler-aged daughter in tow. “All of a sudden, we were not parents, but we were closer to being parents than we had ever been in a lot of ways, in just having a child in our house full-time,” Rogen says. Miller Rogen’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was just 55; she died in 2020 at 68 years old. (The couple cofounded the nonprofit Hilarity for Charity in 2012 to fund research, advocacy, and care for families affected by the disease.) As Nora Ephron famously said, everything is copy.

Miller Rogen started a Notes doc on her phone in 2021 to keep track of the idea that sprung from the situation, eventually cramming it full enough that, in a frenzy of writing between January and April 2025, a script came out. And hey, she already had talent lined up to play the character of Aaron, her husband’s movie-world avatar.

“It came together in a magical way because Seth had availability in his schedule, and we could be like, ‘Let’s do this,’” she says. He had read every iteration of the story and given feedback on it, just as Miller Rogen had done for him. “Seth was right there every step of the journey and very much like, ‘Yes, let’s tell this story.’ There was never a question of if he would play, you know, himself, in quotes, because it’s not quite him.” Though Miller Rogen played a fictionalized version of herself in 2012’s For a Good Time, Call…, which she also cowrote, she’s no longer interested in acting and wrote Babies with Kendrick in mind.

“She has this very special ability to balance humor and love and snark in a way that I wanted that character to embody,” she says, calling it a “dream come true” that Kendrick, who has known the couple since working with Rogen on 2011’s 50/50, accepted the role. Kendrick says she “fell in love” with Miller Rogen all those years ago. Miller Rogen sent her the script along with a “very kind and very personal” letter.

“It was absolutely stunning,” Kendrick says of the script. She was eager to sign on. “Even knowing their personal story and having read the letter and knowing kind of what the movie was about, as I was reading it, I was like, Wait, are they gonna have a baby or not?’”

Though Miller Rogen envisioned Kendrick’s ever present slight edge while writing the character, Kendrick says that allowing herself to be as vulnerable and earnest as the character, as Miller Rogen herself, was a challenge. “A thing I walked away from the movie thinking was, Oh my God! It’s so hard to play a character who is more emotionally evolved than you are. Like, Lauren is so healthy. Their relationship is so beautiful and grounded and solid.” She had to fight the urge to avoid eye contact in some emotional scenes, or to soften hard truths.

“Every time I would think, Well, yeah, if Lauren said it that way, it would be totally moving and beautiful and vulnerable. But if I say it, I’m gonna sound like an asshole. I’m gonna sound needy and pathetic,” Kendrick says. “It was just a fascinating piece of resistance I found myself in.”

In one scene, Kendrick’s character has a tough conversation with Rae’s. “I actually asked [Lauren], like, ‘Can I please just do, like, three takes really defensive and avoidant and angry, and then we can just see what happens?’” Kendrick says. “It was almost like my body wouldn’t let me continue unless I got it out of my system. Do it the bad way, do it the antisocial way, and then once you’ve worked that out, just see what comes up when you dare to show that the things you’re experiencing are fear and hope rather than defensiveness.”

Kendrick and Rogen also got to play something not so common in movies: a happy couple. Their opponent is an internal, philosophical question, not their partner who disagrees with them. Rogen’s Aaron is ambivalent about having kids, and Kendrick’s Annie just isn’t sure.

“The capital-P problem in the movie is never the relationship,” Kendrick says. “The relationship is not toxic. They’re never completely out of alignment. They’re never arguing with each other over what to do. They’re facing problems and decisions as a unit. It would just be so much easier for Lauren to have allowed herself to have a scene where me and Seth are in this, like, awful bickering fight, but that’s just not always the case. That’s one of my favorite parts of the movie, how connected they are. And again, watching [Rogen and Miller Rogen] together really helped me feel out how our relationship should feel onscreen, because, truthfully, we should all be so fucking lucky.”

“Even if it wasn’t a surrogate of me, it was a role I would have found very interesting because it obviously speaks to me very personally,” Rogen says, “and I’m always really interested in showing marriage dynamics that are not traditionally shown in film. Conflict is usually the ingredient while portraying a marriage on camera for the most part, and that’s not what our relationship is like at all. Not to say we aren’t facing hard things in our real marriage. Although life is not easy, and there are hard choices to be made, and hard things you are dealing with, our conflict with one another is not a prevalent theme in our lives. I thought that was a really interesting way to approach this as well, where I was able to play a member of a healthy relationship, which I think is rare. I think it’s interesting.”

The movie isn’t all feelings talk and fun-uncle stuff, either. There are also kid-typical (read: unhygienic) shenanigans and goofiness. Miller Rogen is quick to point out that though the film’s premise is based on the time the couple’s friend and her daughter lived with them, the daughter, now 13 and ready to see the movie, is not canonically responsible for all of the actions of the child character in the film.

“She’s amazing. We’re still very close,” Miller Rogen says. “She is not at all the reason for not having kids [in real life].”

While “she knows that the character is not her,” there’s still one thing Miller Rogen would like to make clear for the record: “She never had bathroom issues. She doesn’t know that’s part of the story because I didn’t let her read the script, but I feel like that’s going to be her biggest concern. Like, ‘You’re telling people I have issues.’ She did not.”