Michael Cera says he was once told to pipe down on set — by none other than Tom Cruise.
The “Superbad” star sat down on “The Louis Theroux Podcast” earlier this week to promote his new movie “The Phoenician Scheme,” and barely remembered working with Cruise for a sketch in 2010 — until the host reminded him, and the memories started pouring in.
“Oh, yes I have!” Cera recalled, prompting laughter from them both. “Crazy thing to forget.”
“I have worked with Tom, that’s crazy,” he continued. “I did work with Tom. I completely did, yeah. It was the MTV Movie Awards, and I don’t even know if you’ve seen those, but they did like funny intro, movie, video things that they did, pretaped funny things.”
Cruise filmed several sketches in character as Les Grossman, the vulgar, fictional studio head he played in “Tropic Thunder” (2008). Some of these skits, which featured cameos from rising stars at the time, such as Robert Pattinson, are still available on YouTube.
“The first moment I had with him, I arrived, they were shooting, and I was talking to the writer, the guy who was writing these scripts about the thing,” Cera told Theroux. “We were just kind of mumbling while they were shooting, but they could hear us.”
“It was just 40 feet away,” he continued. “And Tom Cruise looks at me — I’ve never met him — and they’re in the middle of a take, and he looks and he goes, ‘Is that Michael Cera talking during a fucking take?’ He was joking, but it was also like, do shut up.”
Cera said a later chat with the “Mission: Impossible” star confirmed he wasn’t actually mad.
“Then I met him,” Cera told Theroux. “He’s like, ‘Talking during a fucking take.’ I was like — and I knew he was playing around — ‘It wasn’t me, it was the writer.’ He was like, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding.’ And I was like, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding, too.’”
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Cruise went all out for the 2010 awards show and even performed a live dance routine as Grossman opposite Jennifer Lopez. He had been a Hollywood darling since the 1980s, but saw public sentiment shift in the mid-2000s as a result of his association with Scientology.
Cruise has since turned his image around with a string of successful “Mission” films, public relations stunts and playful late night talk show appearances. Cera told Theroux that Cruise was extremely professional and “very friendly” — despite the semi-joking scolding.
“Tom runs the set,” he added. “I was really there for like five minutes, but what I observed was, he was like the first AD [assistant director] on the set … He was like, ‘Let’s shoot this way first, he’s gotta catch a flight, we’ll get this and then we’ll come around to that.’”
“I mean, he was such a leader,” Cera recalled.
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