There might be no other actor with more of a reputation for awkwardness than Michael Cera. So it’s probably best not to put him in any situation that will enhance that. But that’s exactly what Tom Cruise of all people did.
While Michael Cera and Tom Cruise have never made a movie together (what would that even be about?!), the two did both appear at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, where Cruise made a cameo as Les Grossman and later helped close the show with Best Movie, and Cera co-presented Best WTF Moment. It was here that Cera ran afoul of Cruise during a pre-taped video. As he recalled on Louis Theroux’s podcast (via EW), “The first moment I had with him, I arrived, they were shooting, and I was talking to the writer…We were just kind of mumbling while they were shooting, but they could hear us. It was just like 40 feet away. 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, ‘Is that Michael Cera talking during a f*cking take?’ He was joking, but it was also like, ‘Do shut up,’ you know? But so surreal.” He added, “Then I met him, he is like, ‘Talking during a f*cking 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.’’ And I was like, ‘I’m kidding, me too.’”
That’s one heck of a story for Michael Cera to take back from an awards show like that. And while Cruise says he was only goofing around, we all know that Cruise takes movies and their sets more seriously than just about anyone else out there. Remember his rant on the set of Dead Reckoning during the pandemic? Yeah, that is a dude who you should not tick off on the set…and who can blame him?
Tom Cruise is well out of the promotional circuit for his latest go as Ethan Hunt but he’s still turning up for old friends at their own premieres, as he did for Interview with the Vampire co-star Brad Pitt and F1. Oh come on, Tom, where were you for Michael Cera when he needed you most at the red carpet for The Phoenician Scheme?
