Michael Cera REALLY wanted to play Allan in Barbie.
In an interview with GQ conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike, the 35-year-old actor revealed that he begged director Greta Gerwig to cast him in the hit movie.
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“It was a kind of very last-minute casting,” Michael recalled.
“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 or something, so I told them you probably wouldn’t want to to do it because you probably don’t want to go to London,’” Michael 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,’” Michael added. “I was like, ‘How can I not do it? I need to do it!’”
Michael was then able to get in contact with Greta and told her how much he wanted to wanted to play Allan.
“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?’” Michael explained. “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.”
For those unaware, Mattel first introduced Allan in 1964 as Ken’s best friend, however, he doesn’t fit into Ken’s clothes and many fans questioned just how close the two actually are. He was discontinued a few years later.
“Allan is a sad figure. He’s just a person that doesn’t really have any place in the world,” Michael explained. “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,” Cera said. “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.”
If you missed it, Michael is reprising one of his fan-favorite roles for a new Netflix series!