What you see isn’t what you get
MICHAEL CERA HAS GROWN UP BEFORE OUR EYES and now he’s adding significant wrinkles to his acting chops
MICHAEL CERA “Even the nicest people in the world know what it’s like to be selfish. … Everyone has access to those impulses.”
Early on in This Is the End, a fame-inflected look at the end of days, Michael Cera, played by Michael Cera, is impaled and hoisted high above Los Angeles, wriggling, covered in blood and patting his pockets for his lost cellphone. He finds the phone, but the rest of it doesn’t go so well.
“We had to kill Cera first,” Seth Rogen, who directed the movie with Evan Goldberg, said in a phone call. “It just felt right.”
Kill Michael Cera, the cuddly, tortured indie boy king of Juno and Arrested Development? Why not murder a basket of puppies while you are at it?
Except the version of Cera who is the first of many to die in This Is the End is a cokedout sex fiend who has it coming. In fact, the real Cera, a persistent model of twitchy adorableness, has been playing some pretty rugged roles lately. In Crystal Fairy (scheduled to open in August in Montreal), he is the kind of drug tourist who gives Americans abroad a bad name.
A man-child who grew up before our eyes, Cera is now 25 and in that place where many actors who were irresistible when they were young become invisible as they reach adulthood. It hasn’t gone that way for him. Instead, he is adding significant wrinkles to how people see him.
Cera is in New York looking for an apartment — in Brooklyn, where else? — and we are sitting on the deck of the Standard hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. It is an epic sunny day with working ferries chugging up and down the Hudson, toy boats at this distance. Actors generally step to interviews on highest alert, making sure they convey intellectual heft and a clear sense of their career. Cera has no message, no take, no sound bites, just a curiosity in the questions and a willingness simply to answer them. Similar to his coming-of-age characters, he is funny in a low-key way, but he’s quietly confident, something that doesn’t come through on screen. And unlike his more recent characters, or many actors for that matter, he is very content in the moment, chatting, laughing and quietly cracking wise.
After sitting for a photo, he killed time reading MobyDick and eating a late lunch. A reporter might observe the pretentiousness of the young actor showing up with a thick paperback classic, except that he knew the book and talked at length about Herman Melville’s personal travails.
Cera has an interest in things beyond a busy career that started early and has included movies like Youth in Revolt, Superbad, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Because Cera came of age in public, a child star from Brampton, Ont., who spent his formative adolescence on Arrested Development (on Fox from 2003 to 2006), there is an impulse to assume that the kid we saw on television is now a man we know. And even though he’s performed vile and profane acts in the name of comedy, you can’t help assigning a kind of sweetness to him. If he were dating your daughter, you’d keep an eye on him but secretly be pleased she picked a funny, well-mannered boyfriend.
After going quiet for a stretch — his last big movie was Scott Pilgrim in 2010 — he is having a bit of a moment. There are his short but highly visible cameo in This Is the End and his darkly unsympathetic character in Crystal Fairy, a drug-fuelled road trip film directed by Sebastian Silva. And while Cera’s version of George Michael Bluth in the reprised Arrested Development this spring on Netflix is still a decent sort in a sea of dysfunction, the actor also served as a writer on the new season. While his characters have seemed daunted by the leap to adulthood, the guy who played them seems to be doing just fine.
Mitchell Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, said that the guy who plays tortured and self-conscious is neither. He wanted a look at the young Cera for the pilot, and three weeks later, after he had forgotten about the request, a producer said, “‘Good news, Michael Cera likes the script,’ and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ As a 14-yearold, he was reading carefully to make sure it was right for him and he could do the job.”
Silva had invited Cera down to Chile to make Magic Magic, a dark movie about mental illness, but the financing kept falling apart. Cera, who had been living with Silva’s family and learning Spanish for three months, was worried Magic Magic might never get made. Then Silva mentioned that he had a story about an ad hoc group that comes together on the road in a quest for San Pedro, a cactus that contains mescaline. (Magic Magic eventually did get made, but so far has no theatrical release scheduled. It screens Monday at 7:35 p.m. at the Imperial Cinema as part of Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival.)
Cera was cast as a frantic, boorish drug tourist named Jamie, who casually invites along a woman named Crystal Fairy he met at a party and is stunned when she shows up. Her hippie raps and strained spirituality bring out the worst in Jamie. There are epiphanies, not all of them drug-induced, and for moviegoers, a fair amount of insight into human dynamics.
Cera more than holds his own opposite a remarkable, unalloyed performance from Gaby Hoffmann, who plays the title character. As an actor, he admires her skills, he said, including the ability to balance a beer bottle on her forehead in any position. Asked if he had a parlour trick of his own, he said no.
It was one of at least two lies he told in the interview. The first was that he is not much of musician, when in fact he has toured with a member of Modest Mouse playing bass in a band called Mister Heavenly and has done some respectable guitar work on the soundtracks to his films. (Alia Shawkat, who plays his cousin crush on Arrested Development, said he was a scary-good pianist and guitar player.)
As for that parlour trick, in the middle of the interview, he eyed my pack of cigarettes and asked if he could have one. When I said sure, he grabbed the pack and quickly rubbed it down his face toward his chin, leaving behind a cigarette on his lips.
“Yeah, that’s mine,” he said, sheepishly. “I’m still perfecting it.”
It would not be the first time Cera has done something that impressed others, but his fans could not be blamed for wondering how Cera, the tracksuited dweeb from Juno, has become so capable of playing damaged, unlikable people.
“Even the nicest people in the world know what it’s like to be selfish, even if they don’t act on it. Everyone has access to those impulses,” he said, his friendly, direct gaze suggesting that might include, say, me.
“He’s both fixated and miserable,” Cera said, speaking of his Crystal Fairy character. “He’s a person who is so uncomfortable with himself that he can’t be in the present moment for even a second.”
Silva directed the story without a script but based it on an episode in his life.
“I think it is a bit of an accident” that Cera was always cast as a lovable nerd, he said. “He is a smart guy, a very good actor, and he can play anything he wants to with proper direction.”
Shot in 12 days, the film still manages to cover significant ground.
“I never thought this movie would have any kind of life at all,” Cera said. “It felt like I was doing just something fun with people I like.”
His modesty is consistent but not always merited: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times described it as one of the best films of the Sundance Film Festival, while The Guardian credited him with giving “one of his best performances to date.”
Almost everyone wants to direct when they grow up, but Cera already has some credits. He directed a short film starring Charles Grodin, a hero of his, called Brazzaville Teen-ager, based on a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman, another hero of hèis. There’s also a short called Failure — “My love life in four minutes,” he said — along with a comedy website on YouTube called Jash, involving Sarah Silverman, Reggie Watts, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.
There’s more, but what is preoccupying Cera right now is a switch from Los Angeles to New York. Unlike the Hollywood scenester he plays in This Is the End, he doesn’t get out much.
“I’m not plugged into that world,” he said. “It’s a really good city to be a homebody and sit and watch movies with friends. It takes a lot of work to be plugged in to people. Every day you wake up it’s a new challenge, like: ‘What am I going to do with myself today?’ ”
He also regrets the amount of time that he has spent locked behind the wheel of his 2004 Toyota Corolla.
“You are by yourself, listening to the radio in the car for a lot of time.” he said. “In New York, if you walk outside you are involved. Everyone feels that, and everyone is feeding off that. I saw New York in Ghostbusters when I was 4 years old and decided I would end up living there.”
With his checkered shirt, close-cropped hair and burntorange corduroys just a shade short of geek, he looks like he has already crossed over. People chided him for hanging onto his backpack after Superbad broke large, but he is a lot more that guy than the one in This Is the End. (“I’m pretty sure Michael has never been in the same room as cocaine,” Hurwitz said. )
Cera said his role in This Is the End was easy, because he showed up a few weeks into making the movie, and his fellow actors were riffing on a character named Michael Cera capable of all manner of brutish behaviour. Rogen said it was more complicated than that.
“There was this whole evil mythology built up around him on set, and I worried that he was going to show up and wonder what the hell was going on, but he totally got it right way,” Rogen said. “He is very good at uncomfortable humour, and he has an amazing understanding of comedy in all of its aspects.”
Cera now has some professional credentials to go with that compliment. When Hurwitz resurrected Arrested Development, Cera asked to write for the show.
“You have to remember that I watched these writers work when I was growing up, and I was always so impressed by what they were able to do,” he said. “The writing room is such an interesting study of energies, with all these inner relationships. Take any two of the writers, and there’s a whole set of politics and dynamics between them.”
Sort of like the show. Hurwitz said Cera was eager and highly effective as a writer.
“He is a very gifted guy and was one of the more important people in the room putting this season together.”
Shawkat said Cera was clearly thrilled to be writing for the show, but she isn’t surprised: “We grew up around adults, no one condescended to us or placated us and we make our own decisions. Even then, Michael always had a strong sense of ambition, not in a fluffy Hollywood way but in terms of the kind of work he wanted to do.”
In a lot of his work on the web, Cera makes fun of show business, which, when you think about it, is pretty much all he has known.
“It’s so intertwined with my life since I was 9 years old, and there’s a naturally silly kind of pageantry to the whole thing,” he said. “I mean, it is silly.”
Speaking of which, there was a kind of nerd throwdown conjured by the press between Cera and Jesse Eisenberg, another smart, nervous talker.
“I get it a lot,” he said. “People will tell me they loved me in The Social Network, and I will tell them I’m not Jesse. I was in a convenience store one time buying something, and the guy just ahead of me was paying for something and he looked at me and he goes, ‘Jesse Eisenberg?’ I went, ‘No.’ Then he goes, ‘Michael Cera?’ I was pretty impressed he got it on the second try.”
Our chat wound down as the evening crew made ready for the people who would be showing up soon to the Standard. We hit the street together. I looked for a cab while he walked east in search of a pair of shorts, by himself, no car waiting or posse trailing.
A flash of recognition hit a guy on the street as the actor walked by.
“Hey, Michael Cera, how you doin’?”