The Odd Man Out Who's Always In

Michael Cera was made for the Wes Anderson cinematic universe.

- By Rebecca Alter

MICHAEL CERA BLENDS in among the Brooklyn dads. When I meet him for lunch at a Brooklyn Heights diner, he is wearing tinted glasses and a T-shirt and has some facial scruff. “I have a lot of coffee in me. You'll have to keep me on track a little bit,” he says when I join him in his booth. “I’m sort of free-associating.” Cera is the emblem of awkward aughts adolescence, shooting out of a scene-stealing Arrested Development incest plot into Juno- and Superbad-leading stardom, becoming one of the unlikeliest teen heartthrobs in film history in a run of indie-tinged sleeper hits. He’s the eternal softboi, before we had a word for that, his deer-in-headlights, gawky charms such a signature that an entire 2009 movie was built around the question “Wouldn't it be funny if he grew a wispy little mustache?”

Now Cera is 36, a father of two, and starring in Wes Anderson's 13th film, The Phoenician Scheme. It’s the Canadian actor's first time in an Anderson project, which feels like an oversight or a glitch in the system. As co-star Benedict Cumberbatch put it at Cannes, “Watching Wes discover and use Michael is like God discovering water.” The magic of Cera’s performances has always been his stealthy sense of humor—a wide-eyed deadpan, words that come out wrong, a sweet cluelessness that sometimes cloaks an unexpected edge. He’s a constant outsider, even in the most offbeat settings imaginable. Greta Gerwig used this to great effect, casting Cera as odd-doll-out Allan on her beach of Kens in 2023's Barbie, and it works all too well in the stylized hyperartifice of Anderson's nostalgic, imagined worlds, which would fall apart like paper dollhouses if not for the grounded core of his players.