Michael Cera has worked with so many people in his career that being told off by the legend, Tom Cruise, actually slipped his mind.
In the world of the silver screen, fame becomes commonplace. There are so many big names to remember that sometimes it’s hard to remember them all. While speaking to Louie Theroux on his eponymous podcast, Michel Cera was asked about Tom Cruise.
“I haven’t worked with Tom Cruise…. oh yes. I have. Crazy thing to forget,” Michael Cera said in the interview. “I did work with Tom Cruise. It was the MTV Movie Awards. I don’t even know if you have ever seen those. They did funny intro movie video things, pre-taped funny things,” he continued.
The two of them were on set together, with Tom playing one of his famous acts. “Tom Cruise did one where he was playing his character from Tropic Thunder [Les Grossman]. So they were shooting all day, these little clips of him and that character interacting with various people coming in and out. And I came in and I did a little moment with him.”
But Cruise overheard Cera talking on set and told him off. “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. We were just kind of mumbling while they were shooting, but they could hear us. It was just like 40 feet away,” he recalled.
“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, and ‘is that Michael Cera talking during a f*g take?’ I think he was joking.”
Tom Cruise Telling Off All In Good Humor
According to Michael Cera, Tom Cruise told him off as a bit of a joke. It was very on brand for Les Grossman to scream at someone. “Then I met him, he is like ‘talking during a f—ing take’ I knew he was playing around, so I was like, ‘hey man, it wasn’t me, it was the writer’. He was like, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding.'”
However, during the interview with Louie, Cera did mention how much of a presence Cruise is. “Tom runs the set. I was there for like five minutes, but what I observed was, he was like the first AD on the set.”
He’s a one-man production team.