Michael Cera plays the awkward, one-of-a-kind Allan in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster “Barbie” movie. But if not for arranging a last-minute Zoom call with the director, Cera might not have made it into the film.
“It was a kind of very last-minute casting,” Cera said in a video interview with GQ conducted before the actors strike. “My manager got a call checking on my availability for it, and he called me and he said, ‘I got a call about this movie. It’s the “Barbie” movie. Greta Gerwig’s directing it, and it’s filming in London for four months of something, so I told them you probably wouldn’t want to to do it because you probably don’t want to go to London.'”
Cera continued, “I was like, ‘What! Call them back!’ He didn’t like blow it or anything, but he’s like, ‘I managed their expectations that you might not want to do it.’ I was like, ‘How can I not do it? I need to do it!'”
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Cera then took matters into his own hands.
“I somehow got Greta’s email address, I think through a common friend of ours, and I emailed her like, ‘Can I be in it? Can I do that part?'” Cera said. “And she was like, ‘Let’s get on a Zoom right now. Here’s a Zoom link, I’ll be on there for the next hour.’ So she was just hanging out on the Zoom, like, ‘Click the link whenever you’re ready.’ And then we talked about it, and it just all happened really fast from there.”
In “Barbie,” Cera plays the shy, short-lived companion of Ken. While there are countless iterations of Ken, there is only one Allan.
“Allan is a sad figure. He’s just a person that doesn’t really have any place in the world,” explained Cera.
But why did Mattel discontinue the doll?
According to Cera, “It just wasn’t selling. The world just didn’t need for Ken to have a friend… Barbie is good, we can get a lot more Barbies in here, and friends of hers. But we’ve got Ken, and we don’t need to go deeper in that direction. So Allan fell by the wayside a little bit.”
“Barbie” recently surpassed Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” as Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing domestic release in history, with over $537 million in the U.S. and Canada. The pink fantasia has collected more than $1.2 billion globally and has remained the No. 1 movie for four consecutive weeks.
Watch Cera’s full GQ interview below.
