The Barbie Moment That Caused Greta Gerwig To Fall Over Laughing

It might feel impossible that anybody but Michael Cera could have played the milquetoast, unassuming Allan — though Jonathan Groff was also up for the role — but he told GQ in a recent career retrospective that he almost missed out on the role due to a miscommunication with his agent.

«It was a kind of very last-minute casting,» Cera said in the video. «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 do it because you probably don’t want to go to London.’»

Cera was, understandably, baffled by this move, and asked his manager to redirect right away: «I was like, ‘What! What do you mean? 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.’ I was like, ‘How can I not do it? I need to do it!’» After getting Gerwig’s email, Cera said he just hung out on Zoom for as long as he had to in order to talk to her. «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,’» Cera remembered. «So she was just hanging out on the Zoom, she’s just like, ‘Just click that link whenever you’re ready.’ And then we talked about it, and it just all happened really fast from there.»