Michael Cera

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Cera, the Canadian actor and musician born on the 7th of June 1988, owes his career to a case of chickenpox. At the age of three, stuck in bed, he watched Ghostbusters over and over. He memorized every line of dialogue and came to idolize Bill Murray. That sickroom habit grew into a career that has earned nominations for a British Academy Film Award, three Critics' Choice Movie Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. How did a child from Ontario become the screen's favorite portrait of awkward, gentle youth? Why do his biggest hits sit beside so many strange side projects? And what does he do when he steps away from the camera and onto stages, into bands and behind the keyboard?

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• 2. Brampton Beginnings

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  Brampton, Ontario, is where Cera was born, the son of Linda, née Cockman, and Luigi Cera, a technician. His father's family is Sicilian, and both parents worked for Xerox. He grew up between an older sister, Jordan, and a younger sister, Molly. After the Ghostbusters fever he enrolled at The Second City in Toronto and took improvisation classes. He attended Conestoga Public School, Robert H. Lagerquist Senior Public School and Heart Lake Secondary School until grade nine. Once acting work started, he finished grades ten through twelve online.

  His first job paid nothing at all. It was an appearance in a Tim Hortons summer camp commercial. That led to a Pillsbury commercial in which he poked the Pillsbury Doughboy, and it gave him his first spoken lines. In 1999 he was cast as Larrabe Hicks in the Canadian children's show I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, which ran for two seasons. The same year he appeared in the television films What Katy Did and Switching Goals, the latter starring the Olsen twins.

  Frequency, released in 2000, marked his theatrical film debut, as the son of Noah Emmerich's character. That year he also appeared in Steal This Movie! and in Ultimate G's: Zac's Flying Dream, his first leading role, presented in IMAX theaters. In 2001 he worked on several television films, including My Louisiana Sky and The Familiar Stranger. He also began voicing Josh Spitz in the animated series Braceface, a job he kept until 2004. In 2002 he played the young Chuck Barris, played as an adult by Sam Rockwell, in George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. A year later he became the voice of Brother Bear in the animated series The Berenstain Bears, which aired for three seasons.

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• 3. George Michael Bluth

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  The Grubbs, a Fox pilot Cera filmed in 2002, was critically panned and never aired. He then auditioned successfully for another Fox sitcom, Arrested Development. It began airing in November 2003 and ran for three seasons. The show follows the Bluth family, once wealthy and now dysfunctional. Cera played George Michael Bluth, the teenage son of Michael Bluth, played by Jason Bateman. Fox canceled the series in 2006 because of low viewership, even though critics had praised it.

  In 2006, while the show was ending, Cera created and starred in a parody of Impossible is Nothing, a video résumé made by Aleksey Vayner. That year he and his co-star Alia Shawkat also guest-starred as a pair of college students in the teen noir drama Veronica Mars. Their episode was titled "The Rapes of Graff."

  Netflix revived Arrested Development for a fourth season in 2012, and Cera returned as George Michael. He also worked in the writers' room and served as a consulting producer. That season reached viewers in May 2013. A fifth season followed in 2018, and Cera is credited as a producer on both revival seasons. Between the cancellation and the revival, his film career had taken off in a very different direction.

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• 4. The Superbad Summer

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  A staged comedy video from May 2007 showed Cera being fired from the lead role of Knocked Up after belittling and arguing with its director, Judd Apatow. The sketch mocked the David O. Russell blow-up on the set of I Heart Huckabees. In real life, Cera starred in an Apatow-produced teen comedy, Superbad, alongside Jonah Hill. Their characters were two virgin teenagers about to graduate, whose party plans go awry. Those characters were based on the film's writers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Released in August 2007, Superbad topped the US box office for two weeks in a row.

  Critics singled him out. The Atlantic reviewer said the film "belongs to Michael Cera" for capturing "teenage sexual abashment as indelibly as he did in the role of George Michael on Arrested Development." The New York Times called him "excellent," and CNN praised Cera and Hill for playing "off each other beautifully."

  In November 2007, Cera hosted a live, staged version of Saturday Night Live that was never broadcast because of the Writers Guild of America strike. His second film that year was Juno, in which he played Paulie Bleeker, a teenager who has gotten his long-time school friend Juno, played by Elliot Page, pregnant. For Superbad and Juno together he won Breakthrough Artist at the Austin Film Critics Association Awards 2007. Entertainment Weekly put him on its "30 Under 30" list in February 2008.

  He kept the momentum into 2008 with Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, opposite Kat Dennings. They played two strangers who bond over a favorite band and hunt for its secret show. He also starred in Extreme Movie, a collection of vignettes about teen sex. From 2008 to 2016 he held a recurring role on Childrens Hospital as Sal Viscuso, a staffer known only by his voice on an intercom.

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• 5. Scott Pilgrim and Setbacks

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  Paper Heart, an independent romantic comedy from 2009, had Cera playing a fictionalized version of himself. The film explored an invented relationship between Cera and its writer, Charlyne Yi, who also played herself. The two composed the score together. Also in 2009 he starred opposite Jack Black in Year One, a comedy set in the Stone Age and directed by Harold Ramis. Reviews were poor, though Time critic Mary Pols said Cera's performance saved it from being a "catastrophe."

  Youth in Revolt, his last film of 2009, adapted a novel of the same name. Cera played Nick Twisp, a shy teenager who invents a destructive alter ego, François Dillinger, after falling for a girl played by Portia Doubleday.

  Director Edgar Wright had watched Cera on Arrested Development when he cast him as Scott Pilgrim, the hero of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series. Wright believed Cera was an actor "audiences will still follow even when the character is being a bit of an ass." In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Pilgrim is a musician who must battle the seven evil exes of his girlfriend Ramona, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The film reached cinemas in August 2010. Despite its fans, it did poorly, grossing $47.7 million against a production budget of $85-90 million.

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• 6. Internet Experiments

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  Clark Duke, Cera's best friend, came up with the idea of making videos for the web. Duke was enrolled at Loyola Marymount University and used the videos for his film school studies. He and Cera wrote and starred in a series of short pieces released on their own website. In 2007 the pair signed a deal with CBS Television to write, produce, direct and act in a short-form comedy series, Clark and Michael. It featured guest stars such as David Cross, Andy Richter and Patton Oswalt, and it was distributed through CBS's internet channel, CBS Innertube.

  In March 2013, Cera joined Reggie Watts, Tim & Eric and Sarah Silverman to create Jash, a comedy channel on YouTube. There he has posted short films that he directs or stars in. In Gregory Go Boom, from 2013, he played a paraplegic man. His directorial debut, also from 2013, was Brazzaville Teen-Ager, in which Charles Grodin played his sick father.

  That same year, Cera worked twice with the Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva. Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus were both shot in Chile and premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. For Magic Magic he spent "five hours a day learning Spanish." In Crystal Fairy he starred most prominently, as a self-absorbed man who travels Chile with a woman called "Crystal Fairy," played by Gaby Hoffmann, while bearing a cactus.

  In the summer of 2013 he played an exaggerated version of himself in the apocalyptic comedy This Is the End, alongside his Superbad co-stars Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen. He also appeared on Burning Love, a web spoof of reality dating shows, and on Drunk History as John Endecott. In 2012 he had voiced Nick, a love interest for Lisa Simpson, on The Simpsons. Years earlier, in 2008, he had played Alexander Hamilton in a comedic retelling of the duel with Aaron Burr, on the first episode of Drunk History when it was still a web series.

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• 7. Stage and Sound

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  The Sydney Opera House hosted Cera's theater debut in March 2012, in a two-week run of Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth. His Scott Pilgrim co-star Kieran Culkin and the actress Tavi Gevinson were also in the cast. A Broadway production at the Cort Theater opened in September 2014 and closed in January 2015. New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised Cera for achieving "something remarkable," describing "the sense of an amorphous being assuming and losing shape in the course of roughly 12 hours."

  In March 2018 Cera returned to Broadway for another Lonergan play, Lobby Hero, at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley shared the cast. Cera and Henry were both nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Play at the 72nd Tony Awards. In October 2018 he began a third Lonergan production, a revival of The Waverly Gallery at the John Golden Theatre. He played a painter, acting alongside Elaine May, Lucas Hedges and Joan Allen.

  Cera also writes. His first published short story, "Pinecone," appeared in the thirtieth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly in 2009.

  Music runs through his career as well. In 2010 he contributed mandolin and backing vocals to the Weezer song "Hang On," from the album Hurley. He tours as the bass player of Mister Heavenly, an indie rock band from the American northwest, and belongs to The Long Goodbye with Clark Duke. He also played bass and sang backup in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.

  On the 8th of August 2014 he released his debut album, True That, through his Bandcamp page. It holds 19 original tracks, plus covers of Roderick Falconer's "Play It Again" and Blaze Foley's "Clay Pigeons." In early 2015 the Canadian musician Alden Penner released "Meditate," featuring Cera. Penner's EP Canada in Space followed on the 29th of June 2015 on City Slang records, with a tour of the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany. Cera was both co-headliner and a member of Penner's backing band. His song "Best I Can," featuring Sharon Van Etten, came from the film Dina and was nominated for Best Song in a Documentary at the 2017 Critics' Choice Documentary Awards.

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• 8. Recent Years

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  Hits, a 2014 film by his Arrested Development co-star David Cross, cast him as a marijuana dealer. He also joined John Hawkes and Sally Hawkins in How & Why, a television pilot by Charlie Kaufman that FX rejected. In 2015 he made a brief, menacing appearance in the drama Entertainment. He joined the comedy series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, and played Bill Murray's fictional talent agent in the Christmas musical comedy A Very Murray Christmas. That year he also made a cameo on Louie, in an episode with Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Matthew Broderick. In 2016 he voiced a hot dog trying to escape his fate in a supermarket, in the animated comedy Sausage Party.

  Five films arrived in 2017. He voiced Robin in the animated The Lego Batman Movie and played a sleazy car salesman in How to Be a Latin Lover. In Lemon, Janicza Bravo's first full-length feature, he played an actor whom Variety critic Owen Gleiberman described as having a "wedge of hair that makes him look like Frédéric Chopin crossed with Eraserhead." In Person to Person, opposite Abbi Jacobson, he played a crime reporter investigating a possible murder. In Aaron Sorkin's Molly's Game he played Player X, a poker-playing celebrity said to be a composite of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck.

  A self-described "giant fan" of David Lynch, he appeared in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks as Wally "Brando" Brennan, the son of Andy and Lucy Brennan. The part carried references to Marlon Brando: Wally shares his birthday and is nicknamed after him. Later came Gloria Bell with Julianne Moore in 2018, and the animated Cryptozoo in 2021. In 2022 he voiced Hank in Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank, and he starred in the Hulu series Life & Beth. In 2023 he played Allan in Barbie, opposite Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. In August 2023 he said he was seeking financing to direct a first movie, one possibility being an adaptation of Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis. He had narrowly beaten Clark Duke to the adaptation rights.

  In 2025, Cera drew critical acclaim as the Norwegian entomologist Björn Lund in Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme. Critic Brian Tallerico deemed it "his best work to date."

  Off screen, Cera has been very private. In 2016, Aubrey Plaza made public that they had dated for about 18 months after filming Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and had even considered marriage. The two remain friends. In March 2022, Amy Schumer accidentally revealed that Cera was a father. He then told Extra that the baby was a six-month-old boy, born to him and his German wife, Nadine. In February 2024, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he announced a second son. As of August 2023 the family lives in Brooklyn, New York City.

  In his Criterion Closet Picks video, posted on the 30th of May 2025, Cera said his older son was three and a half. His next listed project, Love is Not the Answer, is in filming, with Cera credited as writer, director and producer.

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