We here at The Playlist have been discussing for some time how Michael Cera has made his career on playing the same character over and over and it looks like Hollywood finally noticed. Not just because he’s playing the same character but because he’s from the Katie Holmes/Jennifer Aniston school of acting and the Michael Cera character, it seems, is extremely close to his actual personality.
Journalists have likened Cera’s outsider, sweet nerd persona to the ’80s archetype first perfected by John Cusack but with the release of a recent New York Times profile in which Cera rebuffs the idea of fame (and reportedly says “I don’t know” a record 48 times) film critic Jeffrey Wells offers up and editorial on his career, hypothesizing he “may be two or three steps from being over.” Hello hype machine, how’s your day?
Wells is not wrong though – looking at Cusack’s early career, he really varied his sensitive nerd roles between extremely low brow but funny air like “Better Off Dead” and “The Sure Thing” with credible but family oriented films like “Stand By Me” and “Eight Men Out” — all topped off with a dash of rom com teen movies, specifically “Say Anything.” Since he varied the audience he’d be reaching it seems like he has a broader palette to work with.
Cera, however, has restricted all his risk taking to Internet shorts (“Michael and Clark,” “Drunk History” and his FunnyOrDie.com faux firing from “Knocked Up”) while his on-screen movie persona has remained consistently sweet, soft and cuddly.
A big part of the backlash, as Wells points out, is that Cera is terrible at doing press. Insiders have told us that Sony have passed on Cera’s participation in certain interviews to promote “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” due to his extreme shyness. When he does talk to the press he comes across as awkward and uncomfortable – calling his return to the Toronto Film Fest “just as foreign a place to him as any big city” (even though he lived there).
At the same time, however, he does say he’s a huge fan of the novel “Youth In Revolt” by C.D. Payne, which is good since he’s slated to star in the movie adaption of it shooting now. The book is fairly raunchy and his cast mates are all big characters (Jean Smart, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Zach Galifianakis) so you can expect him to play the straight man again but hopefully with an edge this time as the novelized version of lead character Nick Twisp is quite obsessed with sex and masturbation. Not exactly Lloyd Dobler territory.