Que Cera, Cera

My interview with Michael Cera - star of Juno, Superbad and now, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. From Day and Night mag in Irish Indo.

Geek hero
Sharp-witted Michael Cera breaks out of the supernerd mould and beefs up for his latest role, writes Susan Daly, who chats to him about school, being cool and coping with fame.
Friday August 20 2010

The first thing you notice about Michael Cera are his glasses. They are thick, plastic-rimmed and out-sized: the perfect accessory to hide behind. I've been told to expect Cera to be a reticent interviewee.

He's been dubbed the nerd-next-door, the king of Generation Y geekdom for his note-perfect gawky teen roles in Juno and Superbad. This could be an awkward half-hour.

"Well," he points out reasonably, "I was a teenager when I made Juno and Superbad." He's 22 now and oddly mature. He says he's "shy, but not painfully so" -- after all, he's been working as an actor since he was nine. He was already a cult comedy figure by 14 when he played George Michael Bluth in black TV sitcom Arrested Development. George Michael was a smart, straight-laced teen, vaguely horrified by the carry-on of his dysfunctional family.

The TV series was prematurely axed after three series, but it laid a blueprint in comedy fans' heads of Cera as a clued-in but slightly oddball kid. His breakthrough movie roles as bewildered baby daddy to Ellen Page's whip-smart Juno and a high-schooler on the margins in Superbad cemented this image in 2007.

In fact, Cera's not a nerd and neither were those characters, not really. Paulie Bleeker in Juno was awkward but not angsty. As Evan in Superbad, he was quiet but thoughtful. When he followed up the next year with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Cera made the earnest indie kid a plausible romantic lead.

Cera has no truck with tags such as geek and nerd. "They are just words," he says. If anything, he gently opted out of the trials of being labelled a jock or a swot, the science nerd or the class clown.

"I went to high school for a year and got the gist of it," he says wryly. "It was nice, I had my friends and we all played poker at lunch and got in a lot of stupid trouble. Oh my gosh, just tried to survive -- it's scary going to public school; there are some scary characters."

And for a minute he does sound like any vulnerable teen worrying about making it through the battleground of high school. As it turns out, he's being quite literal.

"A kid was murdered in my high school the year I was there," he says unexpectedly at the end of our interview. "It was a guy I had met and the guy who killed him was a guy a few of my friends knew -- sorry, this is depressing -- he actually went and turned himself in afterwards." (I check the story out later and it's true. A 14-year-old was convicted of first-degree murder for strangling a classmate with his belt in Cera's Canadian high school in 2003. Cera would have also been 14 at the time.)

There is nothing dramatic in the way Cera retells the story and he almost seems sorry he mentioned it. But it's clear there are worse fates in those unsteady teen years than being considered on the margins of the in-crowd.

Cera himself is not entirely unhip. Those glasses are less of a mask than part of a personal style, best described as 'young fogey'. Cera once cited his comedy hero Larry David as his style icon. Today he wears the kind of green cords and button-down shirt combo one might expect to see on a 60-something-year-old man, but he's also sporting a pair of scuffed but classic Adidas Superstars. It's not a studied look, but it's cute.

He's self-aware, not self-conscious. He laughs at himself going through intense physical training for his new movie, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Based on a comic-book series, it's part fantasy, part superhero epic with Cera required to fight off the Seven Evil Exes of his new girlfriend, cool indie chick Ramona.

"We had to build up some endurance," he says. "It wasn't even about specific moves but learning the language of that physical stuff because for anyone who hasn't done anything like that, those movements are unnatural."

He says he loved doing what comes unnaturally -- but won't suddenly become the next Jason Statham, flexing his pecs in the way he's spent the past 10 years buffing his comedy muscle. "I got a glimpse of it and, man, it's hell." He describes himself as kind of average. "I hang around a lot of short people to make me look good," he deadpans.

Cera does a lot of this, making sure we know he doesn't take himself too seriously but not exactly being self-deprecating. Scott Pilgrim, for example, looks set to consolidate Cera as an alternative hero for gamers and comic-book fanboys, but he's not willing to set the character up as a god.

"Scott's a bit of a Homer Simpson character -- he's a bit of a dope. You can tell with certain gags -- the spinning wheel in his head, 'What am I going to say?' It was just fun to play a total idiot. Like Homer (he gets the girl). Like how did Homer get Marge?"

In Cera's mind, the movie is played out through how Scott sees the world. "Even the evil exes, maybe they're not that evil, they're just against him. It's him against the world, you know? It feels like he's the hero of his own movie in his mind."

Cera's a pretty clear-sighted guy. Growing up in the suburbs outside Toronto with parents who he has described as "funny, funny people", he takes his growing fame as it comes. He even finds he can laugh at the absurdities of LA, where he now lives.

"They have everything in LA. They have dog hotels, which is not something you'll find in Toronto." And what do people do in Toronto when they go on holidays? Tie their pets up in the back yard? "Yeah," he says, cracking a grin, "You just leave him tied up with a bowl of food and tell him everything's going to be fine."

Maybe it's the relaxed Canadian vibe or maybe he just likes taking the Michael. Either way, Cera is fun, in a very gentle sort of way.

Not that he's always entirely at ease with being the centre of attention. "I've been scared before," he says of the growing recognition he gets from movie fans. "The first time I really felt weird about being recognised was at the Toronto Film Festival when I was there for this movie Nick and Norah. For some reason, maybe because Toronto's my home town, it just seemed very intense. Just the amount of people coming at you."

But he's learning -- and from a master schmoozer. "It's really nice when you work with someone who is so much more famous than you are because it makes you realise it could be worse. Jack Black is one of the most famous people I've worked with (in Year One) and he's like Santa Claus. We'll go to a restaurant and people will be lining up to meet him like Santa Claus in a mall."

He also thinks one of his Scott Pilgrim co-stars, the laconic Kieran Culkin, is "a very cool guy; if there's cool, whatever that means, he's got it".

You're not so uncool yourself, I tell him. He smiles and shakes his head, but in Scott Pilgrim he looks as comfortable as Jack Black, rocking out on a bass guitar. He has co-written a score to a small independent film that was well-received at the Sundance festival. Last year he had a short story published in Dave Eggers' cult literary journal, McSweeney's Quarterly.

"Dave Eggers was really nice to me, he sent me a nice email about it," he says modestly. Michael Cera: redefining cool.


Le geek, c'est chic - movies where nerds rule

- THE NET (1995)

Sandra Bullock strikes a blow for computer geeks by fighting shady corporate entity The Praetorians when they steal her identity. She does, however, look unfeasibly hot for someone who supposedly spends 24/7 in front of her computer, eating pizza.

- PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY (1999)

Relates the early IT battles of Steve Jobs and Apple, and Bill Gates and Microsoft. Noah Wyle (Dr Carter from ER) was so convincing as Jobs that Jobs had Wyle impersonate him on stage at the 1999 Macworld Expo.

- X-MEN (2000)

Labelled freaks by 'normal society', it is actually their mutations that give the X-Men their super powers. It's also based on a Marvel comic book -- nerd heaven.

- NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (2004)

Teen geek Napoleon wears high-waisted jeans and the only sport he plays is tetherball (although he boasts of his martial arts prowess with 'numchucks'). Then he blows away his high-school doubters with a funktastic dance.

- SUPERBAD (2007)

Cera stars in this tale of high-school awkwardness with Jonah Hill, but the movie belongs to Fogell/McLovin'. He's a geek to rival Booger from 1984's Revenge of the Nerds, but a geek who (almost) gets the girl.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/geek-hero-2305065.html

Lies, damned lies and CVs

From today's Irish Independent:

Honesty is the best policy for job-seekers when it comes to selling yourself, says Susan Daly

It’s an employers’ market out there: too few jobs and too many applicants. In these competitive times, when everyone is looking to get that edge over the next man or woman, is the humble CV worth the paper it is written on?

Some embellishments are not so immediately transparent — who will really notice if a candidate rounds up a 2:2 degree result to a 2:1, or glosses over a brief spell of unemployment with tales of backpacking around Europe?

Former Green Party senator Deirdre de Burca discovered last week, however, that subtlety is everything. It emerged that when she applied to join European Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn’s new cabinet last December, some of the work experience she listed was incredibly impressive.

Her application read: “Networked extensively with delegations and dignitaries from EU institutions and national parliaments of member states (David Milliband, Nicolas Sarkozy, Javier Solana, etc)” Despite this, she didn’t secure the job.

When asked about the namedropping of major European figures into her job application, she said: “I wasn’t trying to suggest that I have them on speed dial. Of course not. They wouldn’t know me if I knocked on their door.”

She said she was simply showing that she was comfortable with the type of high-level networking that a job in the Cabinet would entail.

And who could blame her for making sure she showed off her experience in the best possible light? After all, so many people go an awful lot further when it comes to their CVs.

Paul Mullan, of career and HR services company Measurability, says that most recruiters would expect CVs to be “highimpact” documents.

“A CV is a self-promoting document, let’s not forget,” he says. “I would never advise people to lie on a CV because they are invariably found out when it gets to interview stage and stumble over elaborating on some exaggeration on it. Some have lost jobs when it is found out they had lied, even if they are actually managing to do well in the post.”

A National Health Service worker in England was jailed for six months at the end of last month when it was discovered that she had falsified references and her A-level qualifications to secure her £23,000 admin job. Rhiannon Mackay (29) was prosecuted for fraud by making false representation.

Overstating your experience won’t necessarily get you thrown in prison but it can be deeply humiliating to be quizzed and found lacking. Hillary Clinton faced a barrage of criticism on the US presidential campaign trail two years ago when she “misspoke” (her word) about a trip to Bosnia in 1996.

She described dashing from her plane with daughter Chelsea as they were fired on by snipers. News footage from the time showed that when they arrived, they were greeted by a young girl in a small, unhurried ceremony on the runway.

Most job applicants will not, like Hillary Clinton or Deirdre de Burca, have the press scrutinising their CVs but in America and the UK there are companies whose business it is to check that the basic qualifications and work experience tally.

“We don’t have these ‘CV detectives’ in Ireland,” says Fergal Brosnan, director of the Berkley Recruitment Group. “In America, they go to town, carrying out standard criminal and financial record checks, checking beyond the written references and so on.”

However, Brosnan feels that Irish applicants are quite truthful, partly because there is such a small degree of separation in Ireland’s workforce. “A lot of our clients would ask internally if someone is familiar with the applicant. Ireland is really small, so it’s pretty easy to find someone who worked in, say, Microsoft, at the time they say they did.”

Drew Douglas, lead CV specialist at careers advice company cvireland.ie, feels that Irish people are overly conscious of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

As such, they are wary of intimidating a potential employer and often undersell themselves.

“It is only when you sit down with some people that you realise they have all these accomplishments and achievements in terms of the actual work they have carried out, which they don’t include on their document,” he says.

Paul Mullan has also found that some Irish jobseekers are wary of “juicing up” their CV.

“When I put their achievements together and present them properly, I often get the comment: ‘I don’t recognise myself ’,” he says.

“I will turn to the individual and ask them if there is one thing that they can’t stand behind on the CV. Everything I have included is factual — it’s just how you present it and word it.”

At the same time, there are frequent CV truth-stretchers that many of us try to get away with and frequently do.

These would include sexing up a job title, rounding up the time spent at a company, expanding the duties a particular role entailed.

Something like exaggerating the remuneration at your last job is a foolish chance to take, however — the lie will out as soon as the new employer gets your P60.

“I think the gaps on CVs are actually the bits that are tinkered with most frequently,” says Fergal Brosnan. “It’s more the element of what is not being said.” These sins of omission might involve not giving the reason why one’s last job terminated.

If it’s the case that you were made redundant, be honest about that. People think it makes them sound like they were the weakest of the pack, but all employers know that in this climate, that is just not the case.”

There is always the occasional chancer, though, who will abandon honesty for a total work of fiction.

“The guy who says he’s been travelling around Australia for 12 months when in fact he’s been in Wheatfield,” says Brosnan.

Or the technically truthful statement that just sounds silly. “You might have someone telling you that they were vicepresident of a company. A company with three people in it. That never sounds right.”
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/jobs-careers/lies-damned-lies-ndash-and-cvs-2136840.html

LIAR, LIAR – Embellishing a CV detail or two can be risky enough for your average worker bee. Consider the chutzpah of these people who embroidered their paths into high-flying jobs – and were then caught out:
• The Apprentice contestant Lee McQueen was called out early on in the 2008 show on his claim that he had spent two years at Thames Valley University. He had in fact quit college four months into his course. Alan Sugar, self-confessed fan of the "school of life", crowned him the winning Apprentice anyway.
• Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, faked qualifications on her own CV when she first joined the Institute in 1979. "I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago," she stated in 2007, "and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since."
• The director of communications at Manchester United is a huge job, and Alison Ryan called it a "dream come true" when she landed the position in 2000. She left Old Trafford after just 13 days when it emerged that she had lied about her education and career history.
• The American film director and actor Orson Welles made his stage debut in Dublin’s Gate Theatre while visiting Ireland as a young man in 1931. He claimed to Hilton Edwards, then director of the Gate, that he was a big Broadway star. Edwards didn’t believe him but gave him the job, impressed by his passionate audition and his ‘creativity’.
• David Edmondson resigned as CEO of major US electronics retailer The Radio Shack in 2006 after "misstatments" that he had degrees in Theology and Psychology were uncovered.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/jobs-careers/caught-telling-lies-2136955.html


CV BLOOPERS
Some embroidered CVs give themselves away in the most blatant way possible, or else are marred by the simplest of errors.

Drew Douglas of www.cvireland.ie lists the following catastrophic real-life CV gaffes on his company's website. “The kind of mistakes people can make on what is a very important first presentation of themselves is astounding,” he says.

● A great lover of languages, I speak intermediate German, highlevel Russian, and fluent Spinach.

● Third Level Establishment: Trinity College. Location: Dublin. Attendance Period: September 1880 to June 1984.

● My duties included greeting laundrette customers, removing their clothes, and washing them.

● Seeking a high-paying job that offers significant perks and bonuses (i.e. company car, extended holidays etc).

● The company made a scapegoat of me-just like all of my other employers. I’m hoping you can do better.

● Managing Director of a small distribution company, by which I mean it consisted of only one employee: myself.

● I was both surprised and humbled to receive not one, but two separate plagues in recognition of my work.

● Have covered whole body in Inca tattoos, but these are not visible when wearing a suit
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/jobs-careers/cv-bloopers-2136953.html

"We're not celebrities"

Cover story of last Saturday's Weekend mag:
By Susan Daly

Saturday April 10 2010

Celebrity culture doesn't sit entirely easy with the Irish. We traditionally take pride in not being too impressed by the rich or famous.

In recent years, however, a number of homegrown photo-driven celeb mags have fared well here. This conflict of curiosity and disdain for the high profile goes some way to explaining the phenomenal interest in Gerald Kean and Lisa Murphy. Some people might know the names but are not sure why; those who do invariably have an opinion on them.

On (non-glossy) paper, this is a solicitor and beauty-salon owner who met in a bar, dated for a few years and then got engaged. He went down on one knee in the smoking section of their favourite watering hole last December, surrounded by her family. Granted, it was the exclusive members-only club Residence and he had originally planned to propose on holiday in Miami, but still.

Few newly engaged couples are asked on a Saturday night TV chat show to spill the beans on their wedding plans. Nor are they introduced to the audience as "Ireland's Posh and Becks" and look unabashed at the hyperbole.

Gerald Kean disagrees. "I'm not a celebrity, I never have been a celebrity and I don't know where this comes from," he says. "I have very influential friends in footballing and in the music world, I do mix with different people, but this is only a very small part of my life. The rest of the time we could just as easily be with Lisa's mum and dad having a Chinese."

Lisa, sitting next to her fiancé on a sofa in Dublin's Dylan Hotel, is listening carefully and wants to add her thoughts. The couple don't go looking for publicity, she says. "People seem to be interested in what we're doing, and we're just ourselves with everybody."

She does, however, have an insight into the attention she has attracted. "I just happened to fall into it because of Michael."

That would be Michael Flatley, the Riverdance hotstepper to whom she was engaged until their split in early 2006. Six months later he proposed to fellow dancer Niamh O'Brien. In jig time, they were married and had a son. His comments in his autobiography that same year, which inferred Lisa hadn't been a woman he could see as the mother of his children, were less than gentlemanly.

The duration and conclusion of her relationship with Flatley fascinated people. It was a long way from a normal suburban home in Ballinteer to being papped on the beach at Barbados with a fabulously rich Irish-American. She rarely said a word when the pair appeared in public or posed for pictures on the front lawn of his Castlehyde estate in Cork. When they broke up, she continued to keep her own counsel.

As it turns out, the air of mystery had a deadly normality to it. She was terribly shy. In her previous relationship with boxer Joe Egan, she had a breast enhancement for what she has said were all the wrong reasons. She has also spoken of staying away from her own debs ball and having to take a Valium before her first date with Michael

Flatley in order to calm her nerves.

"In my relationship with Michael, we were very quiet, I wouldn't have been out as much," she says. Clearly, things have changed for Lisa. She is warm and open, still softly spoken but not timid.

"Gerald is so much more gregarious," she says. "I'm going to a lot more things and meeting more people, and getting my own business has helped [she runs New Lisa Life, a beauty salon in Sandycove]. Gerald would have given me confidence, wouldn't you darling?" She turns to her other half.

"You are totally different now," he agrees. "At the start, it was a bit of a struggle for her with me. In one day she'd be meeting a crowd of friends I'd been friendly with for 15 years in a pub in Manchester, they would be dancing on tables and singing, and that same night she'd be at a black-tie function. But she's far better with people in so many ways than I am and she has been incredible."

Despite all protests to the contrary, Kean has brought a considerable profile of his own to the table. Solicitors don't generally make for good showbiz, but Kean must now be one of the most high-profile legal professionals in Ireland.

There is no shortage of well-off legal eagles here. He is, I'd wager, the only one to have appeared on reality shows such as Celebrity Bainisteoir and The Restaurant.

Part of the publicity is a consequence of the work that helped him move on from a £7,000 starter salary in a solicitor's office in Capel Street. Kean's moniker as 'celebrity to the stars' comes from the early days in which he promoted the tax exemption relief available in Ireland to artists and musicians. He says it is his famous clients who have mentioned his name and not the other way around, although he does then relate an anecdote about trying to stay out of a photograph of Simon and Yasmin Le Bon when he brought the couple to Dublin.

His marriage to first wife, fellow solicitor Clodagh Hopkins, also brought a kind of mutual celebrity. Social diarists liked to gasp over how she flew him and 70 of his closest friends -- Gerald Kean is nothing if not a networker -- to Paris for his 40th birthday in 1997. A few years later, he flew Clodagh and 150 guests by private jet to a ball in a castle near Salzburg.

The profile of the couple after their split in 2006 is interesting. While Clodagh is still pictured at charity gigs from time to time, it is Gerald who is more prominent in the press. Self-publicity or selflessness? He's insistent that he just likes to help out. To be fair, he and Lisa are squeezing in an interview request from me on Easter Monday morning so I can make a deadline.

"I spend every day of my life helping others; whether that is portrayed in the media or not doesn't interest me," he claims. "I travel the country all week, from Portlaoise to Donegal, and any appearances I do for charities I insist the fees go to the charity. I get footballers and musicians involved in fundraising."

He says he didn't mind when his drink-driving conviction in April of last year was reported in the newspapers. "If you're caught for drink-driving, it's right that it's all over the papers."

Nor does he care that his 50th birthday party, where he and his guests dressed up as pre-revolutionary French aristos, was lampooned by "some silly editor". He laughs it off: "We throw a good party -- it was the best night of my life and we loved it!"

Bad publicity doesn't matter as long as it's not inaccurate, he says. I think -- mostly because he mentions, several times, certain newspaper editors who he believes are "unhappy in themselves" -- that he cares a little more than he would like to admit.

Whatever about the outsider's perception of them, the couple seem very happy. Lisa still lives with her folks in Ballinteer and won't be moving to the substantial Kean country pile in Wicklow until the pair marry at the end of this year, or the start of 2011.

"I would be very traditional like that," says Gerald. "It's a big jump because we don't live together but it's exciting to plan where your clothes are going, where mine are going. You're sharing your life."

A significant point for both of them is that Lisa gets on so well with his 13-year-old daughter, Kirsten. "We're very close," she says. "We were on a cruise there a couple of weeks ago and she would say, 'Don't come and get us [Kirsten and friend], dad, I want Lisa to come and get us'. Gerald will get very emotional and I'll say, 'But darling, I didn't want to hang around with my dad at 13. It's nothing personal'."

It's hard to be cynical about them as a couple when it is clear that they look after each other so well. His health issues have also brought them closer together. Diagnosed as a diabetic shortly before they met in late 2006, Kean has to check his blood-sugar levels four times a day and administer insulin. Lisa keeps an eagle eye on him, not wishing to see a repeat of the incident two years ago when he collapsed at a fashion show in the RDS. "It was terrifying," she says.

He's fresh from the gym when we meet, half the man he used to be, and tucking into an egg-white omelette (after the insulin check, of course). "She guides me and I listen," he says. "She certainly had a hugely positive influence on my life especially at a time when I needed it."

The nuptials will be in Kean's native Cork. He had thought they would marry overseas, because his divorce precludes a church wedding here anyway, but they decided against having people fly out and "spending their money abroad".

Instead of gifts, guests will be asked to make a donation to Scoil Triest in Glanmire, Co Cork, a special school for students with learning disabilities. It's especially personal to Lisa, whose older brother Paul had special needs and died in a road accident in 1995.

"If we have a big wedding, more power to it because we'll get more donations to Scoil Triest," says Gerald. But doesn't ostentation of any kind attract ire, I ask?

"Lisa and I made whatever money we have ourselves. Am I going to stop drinking a nice bottle of red wine? No. Am I going to stop buying a nice shirt and tie? No. I do not come from the stable that, from now on, I must eat stale brown bread. If I make €1,000 tomorrow, I am very happy to spend €500 on a bottle of wine and €500 on a charity."

He mentions that if the couple have babies, as they hope to do, he wishes they will look like their mother. "I want that on the record! And I hope they would have my positivity and enjoyment of life.

"Nothing gets me down."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/im-very-traditional-lisa-still-lives-at-home-2132818.html