The Arrested Development star talks to BuzzFeed about the darker turn he’s taking in a series of films out this summer. Oh, and he’s writing and directing, too.
The first time most of us encountered Michael Cera he was a baby faced 15-year-old snuggled up on an air mattress fitted with generic sports-themed sheets in the pilot episode of Arrested Development. When the new episodes premiere on Netflix on May 26, George Michael Bluth will be a college freshman at UC Irvine — but since it's in Orange County, he won't be far from home.
In the intervening years, Cera, like his trademark character, has been schooled — but not in a James Franco way. In fact, you might call Michael Cera the Anti-Franco. The actor, who turns 25 this year, has foregone college and instead spent the past few years embedded as an apprentice with a few of his role models — learning writing, acting and directing straight from the source.
Cera lived with Chilean director Sebastian Silva and his family in South America for three months during the summer of 2011. He spent a couple weeks holed up in an Upper East Side diner with 82-year-old author and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman (Splash, The Heartbreak Kid) this past winter, adapting the man's short story for his own directorial debut. To top it all off, he also spent several months in the Arrested Development writers' room, working alongside the same folks who wrote him into the model home attic in the first place.
Michael Cera poses for a portrait during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Via: Victoria Will / AP
"Whatever happened with you and my driver at Sundance?" Michael Cera inquires, like a kind yenta, as I'm ushered into a room at a Sheraton hotel in Universal City by a publicist in April. In January, Four months earlier, I'd accidentally met Cera's driver at a sushi restaurant in Park City. "Alex, right? I liked that guy. I had high hopes for you two — just because I would be so central to that story."
Cera doesn't really need another central role — besides writing for and acting in new episodes of Arrested Development, he's starring in two short films for the YouTube channel Jash (the second of which, Gregory Go Boom premiered on Wednesday) as well as two feature films that premiered at Sundance (one of them, Crystal Fairy, will be in theaters July 12). He's also appearing alongside Seth Rogen and James Franco in This Is The End (out June 12).
Of all of these, the most highly anticipated, by far, is Cera's reprisal as George Michael. There were rumors for a while that Cera was reluctant to return to the role — the last holdout among the cast members for the Netflix reboot — but when production began Cera hadn't just signed on to appear in the series, he was helping to write it too.
No one really planned for Cera to be in the Arrested Development writers' room. He says he just showed up the day that they were writing for George Michael and he was curious, so he hung around. "I really wanted to be in there just 'cause it seemed like I had the chance to be. I really wanted to see what goes on in there and be around those guys," Cera says.
At the Television Critics Association in January, series creator Mitch Hurwitz said it wasn't long before Cera became indispensable: "Suddenly we were very dependent on Michael Cera being in the writer's room. He completely understood this complex story. He added to it. He pitched in character. It became clear — it's like, wow, this is like his first language, Arrested Development."
Hurwitz, Jim Vallely and Dean Lorey had been working on the story since November 2011. Cera joined them in June 2012, with filming beginning in August.
When I meet him nine months later, Cera still has seen only the first two episodes, even though the entire series is scheduled to debut on Netflix just a few weeks later — Hurwitz is still editing the rest.
To hear Cera tell it, the whole process was kind of like that — down to the wire, operating at a level of dysfunction befitting the Bluth family. "We were writing basically through July and August, just really casually, and then it got to the point where you looked at the schedule and you were like, okay they're shooting Maeby's episode next week and there is literally no script," Cera says.
On some days, Cera says, "Mitch would be on set and, you know, call the writers room and say, 'Stop what you're doing, I need this scene because we're about to shoot it.'" The show's writers would then have about a half hour to write the scene. "Jim Vallely calls those 'fireman missions.' Like you get a call and you have to jump into action and do it."
He adds: "Those were really fun moments. But I was so happy that it was not my responsibility, in those moments, to get it done. I just had to be in there and try to contribute something."
The distinction between contributing and controlling a shoot is one Cera has become more familiar with recently, as he's writing and directing his own projects. When he speaks of Hurwitz, it's with a mix of admiration and bewilderment that suggests Cera learned both what to do and what not to do from watching the veteran show runner operate up close.
"He is very dangerous in the way he schedules things. I don't think he means to be, but he'll really push himself into a corner with production aspects and with unwinding stories and fights his way out of it," Cera says. "You have to put your faith in him because you're not going to do it any other way — he's leading the thing."
It sounds scary — until you remember that faith in Hurwitz helped lead Cera to where he is today.
Cera and co-star Gaby Hoffmann at the Sundance premiere of Crystal Fairy in Park City, Utah.
Via: Danny Moloshok / AP
