Michael Cera On Why He Nearly Quit Acting After Superbad And Juno

Actor Michael Cera has revealed he questioned whether or not he should keep acting after after quickly becoming a famous teenager from his roles in the movies Juno and Superbad.

He told The Guardian that the quick fame he achieved after those films was “sort of overwhelming.” He said he didn’t know how to handle simply walking down the street over concerns about how people might act around him. “Fame makes you very uncomfortable in your own skin, and makes you paranoid and weird. There were lots of great things about it, and I met a lot of amazing people, but there’s a lot of bad energies, too, ones that I was not equipped to handle,” he said.

Cera said drunk people in particular who recognized him created a “toxic” environment with their actions around him.”When you’re a kid, people also feel they can kind of grab you–they’re not that respectful of you or your physical space,” he said. “I didn’t know how to respectfully establish my own boundaries.”

This affected him so much that he considered stopping taking jobs that he knew would make him even more famous. As an example, he turned down a hosting role on Saturday Night Live around this time. Cera said he was “kind of having a bit of a crisis.”

Things got to a point where Cera said, “I really didn’t know if I was going to keep being an actor.”

But Cera didn’t quit acting. He starred in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs The World in 2010 and would go on to a join the band Mister Heavenly and branch out in other ways as part of a process of trying to figure out what he wanted beyond starring in movies that would make him “bigger and bigger.”

Cera will be seen next in Barbie, which hits theaters on July 21. He also leads the TV series Command Z from Steven Soderbergh that is out now.