Best known for making people laugh, Seth Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, released a more serious film in 2025: Taking Care, a short documentary, follows their experience navigating Lauren’s late mother’s struggle with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The intimate footage gives rare insight into the emotional, physical, and financial toll that caretaking has on families. “We want to make these stories visible and human, and show that caregivers are everywhere, often quietly doing this incredibly important and difficult work,” Miller Rogen says. The film also serves as a call to action, encouraging people to talk more openly and demand better systems that support caregivers and brain research.
More than 1 in 5 adults in the United States now serves as an unpaid caregiver. As the baby boomer generation ages, more and more young people are forced to take on this role at the same time that they are trying to start their own careers and families—a burden that comes at a significant emotional and economic cost. Alzheimer’s and related dementias “affect every part of a person—how they speak, move and relate to the world,” says Rogen. “It’s a devastating disease, not just for the person diagnosed, but for the entire family.”
After experiencing this firsthand, the Rogens founded Hilarity for Charity in 2012. “HFC has been a way for us to turn pain into purpose,” says Miller Rogen. “It started from a deeply personal place, but it’s grown into a community that’s supporting families and changing the conversation around caregiving.” Through the nonprofit, the Rogens have raised over $28 million for brain health education, dementia prevention research, and caregiver support, awarding over 475,000 hours of free in-home care to help family caregivers. True to the orgs name, they also lean into humor. “Humor helps people engage in a more human way—where their guilt and sadness and stress can also mean laughter and support and commiseration,” says Rogen. In addition to HFC’s live comedy shows, the Rogens are currently producing Tangles, an animated feature film about a woman caregiving for her mother who has Alzheimer’s, which stars Julia Louis Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, and Beanie Feldstein. Their ultimate vision is a future where Alzheimer’s is preventable and treatable, and caregivers receive the support they deserve. “Until that future becomes reality, HFC will be here, standing with caregivers every step of the way,” Miller Rogen says.