Ahead of his voice acting role in “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” Netflix’s next installment in the “Scott Pilgrim” franchise, Michael Cera looked back on his fond memories leading the 2010 Edgar Wright movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
“It was so much fun all the time because we just had the greatest vibe with everybody,” Cera said in a video interview with GQ conducted before the actors strike. “That basically trickled down from Edgar, and the energy he was creating. We all got to rehearse together and spend a lot of time together before we even started making the movie.”
While Cera had dozens of roles under his belt before headlining the graphic novel adaptation, he was still only 22 years old, and the experience perhaps set up false expectations for working in Hollywood.
“By the end of the movie, I felt like, ‘This is my world. This is my group of friends. It feels like it’s always going to be this way,’” Cera said. “Honestly, I was a little depressed when we were done because it all just goes away, and you’re like, ‘Where did everybody go?’ You get used to that as you get older and as you’re acting for a while, but I was sad to lose it. I could have kept making that forever, even though it was exhausting.”
As the title character, Cera was on the set of “Scott Pilgrim” for nearly a year, while “other people kind of came and went.” The action-romance film also starred Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aubrey Plaza, Kieran Culkin, Brie Larson, Chris Evans and Jason Schwartzman. “I was there for I think nine months or something, which is an enormous amount of time to work on something,” Cera said.
In order to prepare for the movie’s many fight scenes, Cera said the cast did plenty of endurance training and fight choreography, which the actor said felt “unnatural.”
“There were a couple of times where I got hurt… trying to block [a kick] over and over and find the right point in space to put your hand,” Cera said. “One time I just went too low and received the full blow of this guy’s kick, one of the stuntmen. It’s an insane feeling you can’t believe is happening to your hand. You didn’t know you had these muscles in your hand and now they’re throbbing for like a week. Like a train hit me in the hand. It’s very weird.”
“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” reunites the full cast of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” in voiceover roles. The series premieres on Netflix on Nov. 17.
Watch Cera’s full GQ interview below.