At long last: Michael Cera in a Wes Anderson film
The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s twelfth film, marks the first collaboration between two men who defined the twee 2010s.
Shortly after the cast of The Phoenician Scheme was announced, a tweet went mildly viral: “Wes Anderson casting Michael Cera must’ve felt like the cavemen discovering fire.”
It’s a good line, not least because it taps into the collective Mandela Effect that insists this pairing already happened. Surely Cera was a harried telegram boy in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or a pale cousin named Milo in Moonrise Kingdom? Nope.
The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s 12th film, marks the first collaboration between two men who defined the twee 2010s – and not for want of trying.
Cera was nearly in 2023’s Asteroid City, but scheduling got in the way. “I was so disappointed to miss that chance,” he says. “So when this came along, it felt like redemption.”
Review catches Cera on Zoom at home in New York, where he’s recharging after filming Edgar Wright’s latest (the two last worked together in 2010s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). His camera is off. In its place: what appears to be a poorly edited image of Leon Trotsky with Cera’s face – no doubt taken from the long-running internet project “ANewBadlyPhotoshoppedPhotoOfMichaelCeraEveryDay.” Fitting, since Trotsky’s eyewear, Cera explains, was a loose reference point for his character. For the duration of our interview, Cera will remain concealed behind this image.
In The Phoenician Scheme, Cera plays Bjorn, a Norwegian tutor and entomologist hired by plutocrat Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) to educate his estranged daughter Liesl – now a nun, played by Kate Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton. Together, the unlikely trio embark on a globetrotting adventure to realise Korda’s latest project: an audacious series of infrastructure deals he sees as both a legacy and a long-term wealth machine.
It’s a typically Andersonian caper – ornate, silly, and faintly melancholic. But Bjorn, with his thick glasses, scrambled syntax and quiet dependability, might just be the emotional anchor of the film. And, as with his turn as Allan in Barbie, Cera all but steals the show. “He’s someone you’re not sure if you can trust,” he says, “but ultimately, you can.”
Anderson and Cera have known each other for about 20 years. They met in New York, in the most perfectly Wes Anderson way: “We had sort of a tea ceremony.”
The director reached out about The Phoenician Scheme before the script was finished, with the vague message: “There might be a movie and are you available theoretically in this window?” Cera says. “I was like, ‘Well, of course.’”
And while the script was, he says, “wonderfully” written, Anderson had described Bjorn as Norwegian without quite working out what that might sound like. “He knew he described him as Norwegian but hadn’t heard the voice in his own head.” It was up to Cera to bring that to life – and it’s a role that pushes him beyond his usual subtlety into overtly comic territory.
He and Anderson workshopped the voice together during rehearsals at Babelsberg Studios in Germany, where they were joined by the film’s two other leads, Del Toro and Threapleton. There were no trailers and the four would bond over “Lunch Club” – eating sandwiches on picnic benches.
Much of rehearsal was spent figuring out how to actually play Bjorn. In the end, neither Cera nor Anderson was too bothered about perfecting a Norwegian accent. “I didn’t want to sacrifice fun for accuracy. The priority was to make sure the character was doing the right thing for the story.”
The turning point? A pair of brutally strong prescription glasses. “It was basically like a mask. It completely changed not only my face but also how I saw.”
Which could, of course, be a challenge when dealing with Anderson’s famously fussy blocking.
“Things are very specific because there is a very delicate spell being sustained throughout his movies that is very easy to break,” Cera says. “That’s why Wes is quite particular about the way that you cock your head. You know? If it’s wrong, it can break the spell.”
He laughs, nervously. “At the same time you want to feel alive within that.”
That tension – between precision and spontaneity – is, for Cera, what gives Anderson’s films their strange electricity. “I always feel like Bill Murray, and Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore – and also in Bottle Rocket, those guys too – just created this sort of amazing alchemy with what they’re doing. The sort of shaggy quality of their acting, framed within Wes’s austerity and classical compositional approach – that juxtaposition is what makes it really magical. And also the vibrant dialogue that’s really alive. I feel like that’s kind of the recipe for Wes. I just wanted to be kind of messy where I could, to keep things messy within this beautiful, classical composition.”
At 36, Michael Cera has been famous for more than half his life. He started acting at 11, broke out on Arrested Development, and quietly established himself as a master of understated comedy. If you’ve seen Juno, Superbad, or Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, you know the drill. He doesn’t raise his voice and never breaks into anything resembling a conventional laugh.
In some ways, he’s the millennial Hugh Grant – both built their early careers on the art of the reactive performance, where the plot merely serves as a backdrop for their neurotic charm.
Neither really plays characters so much as they play a version of themselves, trapped in scenarios and politely flinching their way through them.
For a moment in the mid-2010s, Cera was everywhere. But instead of cashing in on ubiquity, he veered sideways – into art films and plays. In conversation, he’s as hesitant and gracious – and as eager to deflect – as you’d expect. “I’m sorry if that’s a boring answer,” he offers at one point. “Is that your guitar amp behind you? It looks like a nice place!”
In the past decade, he’s worked with auteurs like David Lynch, Sebastian Silva, Greta Gerwig, and Kenneth Lonergan. “I think everybody would say yes to people like that.” His criteria, he says, has less to do with strategy than gut feeling. “I don’t really think in terms of what I want to do. It’s more about what I don’t want to do. That becomes clearer with time.”
What doesn’t he want to do? “I couldn’t even define it … But say an opportunity comes up and it doesn’t feel right or doesn’t call your name … and then something does and you just feel the lack of, uh, fight-or-flight instinct. You feel safe.”
That intuition has served him well – though he’s quick to admit it’s been easier for him than for most. “I don’t freak out too much when I have intervals of not working. Some actors can get really itchy and anxious because you’re a freelancer and you never know what’s around the corner and when your next paycheck will come,” he says. “You have to make peace with that instability. But I’ve always lived a life of very low means” – he famously does not own a smartphone – “because I want to be able to have that freedom to be selective.”
That freedom is also what’s allowed him to stay close to the things that first inspired him – the films and shows that shaped his tastes as a teenager. Asked to name his favourite of Anderson’s films, he hedges – but only slightly. “I think by default I would say Rushmore, because there was just a time in my life when I was a teenager and watched it all the time. I watched it so much and loved it so much. It became sort of a big part of what I love.”
It was, he says, one of those formative fixations that “tattooed” itself onto him. “Rushmore and A Clockwork Orange and the British Office – those were it.”
These days, though, he’s seeing Anderson through a different lens. “Recently I’ve been watching Fantastic Mr. Fox over and over with my three-year-old son. It’s been really fun to watch and see through his eyes.”
The Phoenician Scheme is in Australian cinemas from May 29.
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