Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fogell, aka McLovin, in ‘Superbad’ (Photo: Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection)
Ready to feel old? Superbad scene-stealer McLovin — played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse in the 2007 comedy favorite — has officially hit the big 4-0. And the character’s creator, Seth Rogen, celebrated that momentous birthday with the ultimate gift: a viral tweet. “Happy 40th birthday McLovin,” the actor and screenwriter wrote on Twitter alongside a picture of the character’s June 3, 1981 birthdate. The 39-year-old Rogen also made sure to boast of his own relative youth. “We wrote this joke when we were 14 years old,” he added, the age he and longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg were when they first starting penning the script that became Superbad.
And McLovin’s birthday isn’t just Twitter official: it was briefly Wikipedia official. A Superbad super-fan took it upon themself to add it to the list of prestigious June 3 birthdays, alongside first lady Dr. Jill Biden and tennis superstar Rafael Nadal. (McLovin’s entry didn’t stay up there long, however. It’s since been taken down.)
In real life, of course, Mintz-Plasse is a sprightly 31, roughly the same age as his actual fictional counterpart Fogell, the Superbad best buddy of high school seniors Seth and Evan, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, respectively. Unlike his pals, though, Fogell had that elusive treasure every teenager covets: a fake ID to make those pre-house party alcohol purchases possible. In the movie’s centerpiece comic sequence, Fogell uses his Hawaiian-born alter ego to purchase two heaping shopping baskets of liquor, before he’s punched out by a robber.
After Rogen posted his birthday tribute, other fans ‘fessed up to their own McLovin cosplay, with or without illicit booze.
It’s worth nothing that the most famous McLovin impersonator remains Daniel Alfredo Burleson, a 20-year-old Iowa City resident who got busted in 2019 for using the character’s signature Hawaiian ID while trying to buy drinks at a local bar. “My work here is done,” Rogen tweeted at the time.
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Interestingly, Mintz-Plasse — who had a small role in last year’s Oscar-winning hit Promising Young Woman — has yet to raise a glass in honor of McLovin’s 40th birthday on his personal social channels. In the past, the actor has said that he has an uneasy relationship with the movie that made him a pop-culture icon. “It was very tough to be a nobody one minute and then, literally, two days after the movie came out, it was me getting recognized everywhere,” Mintz-Plasse told the New York Post’s Page Six earlier this year.
“It was very alarming for a 17-year-old person. I was trying to figure out who I was as a human being at the time and then to have millions of people knowing you as McLovin was very intense,” he continued. “It was very alarming, it was very intense. There was a lot of anxiety, a lot of breakdowns, but I had a great support system of friends and family, a great agent and manager to help me guide a career that I wanted — but it was intense.”
Rogen has also expressed some regrets when looking back on Superbad, though none of them relate to underage booze-buying. “There are probably some jokes in Superbad that are bordering on blatantly homophobic at times,” he remarked in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. “They’re all in the voice of high school kids, who do speak like that, [but] I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we also were, to some degree, glamorizing that type of language in a lot of ways.”
Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this year, he acknowledged that he’s becomes more “sensitive” to the way he writes young male characters in the years since the film’s release. “[The] characters learn lessons ultimately,” he noted of the script, adding that comedies seem particularly susceptible to controversy. “Sometimes people project that this is us saying these things, not that we are smart enough to understand that these are characters that are saying bad things and learning lessons, ultimately.”
Superbad is currently streaming on Netflix.
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