Michael Cera’s struggle with fame

Now that Michael Cera is a big movie star, said Gregory Kirschling in Entertainment Weekly, he’s seriously thinking of quitting the business. The soft-spoken Cera, 20, catapulted to fame with his performances as sensitive, young funny guys in Superbad and Juno, and he has two A-list films due out next year. Cera, who appeared in the cult sitcom Arrested Development when he was 15, still loves acting. But he can’t say the same about being a celebrity. “That aspect of the job is kind of new to me. It’s scary.” The paparazzi, he says, are “so aggressive, and really mean.” And he has been getting a little freaked out by all the strangers eyeballing him on the street. “I was always self-conscious, and feeling like you’re being looked at just amplifies that feeling—you get paranoid.” One solution, he says, may be to start doing smaller parts, “where I could just kind of relax and not have to worry about it too much. That would be fun.” Cera says he understands that people don’t like to hear actors complain about fame, but he truly thinks the whole scene simply may not be for him. “Acting’s not something I need to live, by any means. I don’t want to change because of other people. So I’ll just see how it goes.”

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