The Phoenician Scheme is in theaters June 6.
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.
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Next to his coffee, Cera’s small black flip phone — he is a millennial committed to the bit of being a dumbphone user — sits on the table atop a hardcover tome that he’s eager to show me. It’s an edition of 19th-century French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre’s Book of Insects, a gift from Anderson. In the film, Cera plays Bjorn Lund, a Norwegian entomology tutor hired by Benicio del Toro’s crazy billionaire Zsa-zsa Korda who swiftly gets dragged into a globe-trotting wild-goose chase of a plot and just as swiftly falls for Korda’s daughter, Liesl, a nun-in-training played by Mia Threapleton.
Anderson loves his characters to have their fixations as a way to fill his worlds with collections and things. Fabre was “spiritual inspiration” for Bjorn. “He’s a very charming writer,” Cera says. “He was famous for his approach to entomology and was controversial because he was very personal in his observations.” To play Bjorn, he adopted Fabre’s passions as his own. “This is a beautiful text,” he says. “I mean, the first chapter is ‘The Sacred Beetle.’” He tells me this is another name for the dung beetle, one of his tiny co-stars in the film, to whom he waxes poetic during a scene in the desert. He describes how dung beetles fight over their prized poop balls, steal them from one another, feast on them, and lay their eggs in them. It’s perfect table talk before lunch.
Cera grew up with Anderson’s movies. He recalls seeing The Royal Tenenbaums in theaters with his mother: “It was kind of a revelation. And then I got really obsessed with Rushmore and watched that over and over and listened to the soundtrack.” I wonder what it was like for him to work with Jason Schwartzman on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World after being such a fan of his earlier film. It turns out he first met Schwartzman on speakerphone in Jonah Hill’s car. “I was so excited he knew who I was,” he says. “So much of what I associate with the humor of Wes’s movies is alive in Jason. It’s his voice.” Cera was conscious going into The Phoenician Scheme not to “imitate what I think a Wes Anderson performance is.” The result is one of the more delightful performances in an Anderson film in ages.
He plays Bjorn as nervous and sweet — not unlike the tarantula he grew fond of on set — an eccentric nerdling in little bow ties and Coke-bottle glasses. “I’m kind of a bug myself in the movie,” Cera says. “The glasses have this crazy prescription. Initially, they were crazier, like minus-16. I looked like Milhouse. Wes thought it was too much, and Benicio said to me, ‘You look like a bug.’ We dialed it back a bit. I think it was too alienating.” Cera had similar conversations with Anderson about his character’s voice, a bouncy Norse accent reminiscent of the Swedish Chef that mines comedy out of every single line reading. “It’s baked into the script that he’s a Norwegian character, but Wes hadn’t heard that in his head,” he says. “When I came and brought up the accent, Wes really had to process it.”
Photo: Bobby Doherty for New York Magazine
This wasn’t supposed to be Cera’s first Anderson film. The director had tapped him for Asteroid City, but the production dates ended up coinciding with the birth of Cera’s first son, now 3. When Anderson contacted him in 2022 while writing The Phoenician Scheme, Cera thought to himself, I won’t miss it again. He was almost stymied a second time by the birth of his second son, but the writers strike actually made the scheduling work, and soon he was moving to a city just outside Berlin, kids in tow.
Temporarily relocating to Europe with a newborn so Daddy can go to work handling beetles and kissing Kate Winslet’s daughter sounds chaotic and disruptive, but Cera’s wife, Nadine, is German, so “it was a dream.” His Schwiegermutter (mother-in-law) was around a lot, and they enrolled his elder son in a German preschool. “We thought we’d get him speaking German there, but actually the German kids started learning English from him,” he says. “Other parents were telling us their kids were saying English words at home.”
Cera’s own childhood was quintessentially ’90s — Nintendo, The Simpsons, Jurassic Park on VHS. He stresses he got into acting because he wanted to; he remembers seeing kids who were clearly being made to audition by their parents. In 2003, he landed the role of George Michael Bluth on Arrested Development and broke out even further after the show’s cancellation in 2006. At first, he was grateful to keep working in Hollywood, making things and getting over the “alien hurdle” as a kid from Toronto. “I was 16, 17, and Arrested Development ended, and I just couldn’t see the future,” he says. “I didn’t know if I’d have opportunities to keep working in the States or if I would ever get a shot like that again.” When he was 18, Superbad came along, “a miracle of timing of being the right age for that part and with that group.” He recalls the “drinking-themed” last day on set with his co-star Martha MacIsaac and director Greg Mottola: “We were drinking cheap, orange-flavored vodka at eight in the morning, and everybody kind of joined us.”
He was saying “yes” to every opportunity but wasn’t prepared for the level of fame that followed. “Being almost 37, your boundaries are more established and people treat you differently,” he says. “But at 19, I felt very exposed. It shook me, and I didn’t want more of that.” At 20, he turned down a Saturday Night Live hosting gig, which led to a phone call from Lorne Michaels. “I was like, ‘I’m kind of freaking out,’ and he understood.” Cera was living in Los Angeles at the time and had a photographer relentlessly pursue him for a day. “I was so scared. He was taking pictures of me from his car, stalking me around the neighborhood like a whale,” he says. “I went to a movie just to get away from him, and when I came out, he was still there.”
It’s enough to make you want to leave Hollywood, move to Brooklyn, and do theater and indies, which is exactly what Cera did. He looked to John C. Reilly’s career as a source of inspiration. There’s a spark of Reilly in Cera’s performance in The Phoenician Scheme. He lingers in the background of scenes like a very funny, focus-pulling lampshade, futzing with an insect or longing after Liesl. His bespectacled face twists into confusion or crumples into concern as he reacts to whatever manmade chaos is distracting him from his bugs. His ability to go a little blank and unreadable in the eyes, a little stiff in the posture, makes his moments of surprise all the funnier — whether he’s walking into an airplane cabin with a Looney Tunes–size bundle of TNT, getting drunk off two beers, or describing his first experience in a brothel (said in a Muppet-y accent: “It left me cold”).
With Mia Threapleton in The Phoenician Scheme. Photo: TPS Productions/Focus Features
Bjorn takes a turn in the film’s third act, as so often happens with Cera’s characters. Awkwardness gives way to some sort of hero moment or bad-boy edge, as with his Youth in Revolt rebel, his Goku-level comic-book-action mastery in Scott Pilgrim, and his cameo as a coke-fiend version of himself in This Is the End. Cera has comedically played against type for as long as he has had a type — take his rich-boy card shark in Molly’s Game or Brando-styled biker-philosopher in Twin Peaks: The Return. He says he likes to be “a little bit of a flavor that cuts into what else is going on.” He recalls the time he played the asshole too well, staging a behind-the-scenes freak-out on the set of Youth in Revolt in a parody of the viral video of Christian Bale on the set of Terminator Salvation. Producer Bob Weinstein wanted him and director Miguel Arteta to film some sort of promo, and that’s what the two friends came up with. “I’ve had people talk to me about it over the years like it was real,” Cera says. “I did a meditation retreat when I was 21, and one of the guys there was like, ‘I saw you in a video one time. I thought, That guy needs meditation in his life.’ I know he was embarrassed for me.”
After lunch, we walk around Cera’s old neighborhood. He points out a playground “that has toys that just live here.” That’s nice, I think. But no. He gestures to a plastic play kitchen that looks like it could be from a Fisher-Price–Hereditary collaboration. “I brought my son here, and you see him handling these things that are full of grime and you just assume rats walk all over them at night,” he says. “I never would’ve thought of myself as germophobic until we had a child during COVID. Suddenly, you’re very aware of bacteria and molecules. But I don’t think we turned him into a neurotic person.” And despite revering the sacred beetle, he still hates its Brooklyn equivalent, the cockroach: “What I don’t like about them is how canny they are. You can sense their intelligence when they see you.”
Photo: Bobby Doherty for New York Magazine
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