The cast of Wes Anderson players continues to be one of the starriest rosters in all of Hollywood. Whenever the director sets up a new project, he has an increasing spread of go-to names ready to enter his meticulously-crafted worlds (Bill Murray! Jason Schwartzman! Tilda Swinton!), whilst always expanding it with new faces. In The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s follow-up to 2023’s Asteroid City, he’s welcoming someone who’s long been an Anderson acolyte, but has never worked with the man himself: Michael Cera.
Here, Cera plays Björn, a Norwegian tutor hired to educate the sons of Benicio Del Toro’s businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda – a role that unexpectedly takes him across the world with Korda, and the businessman’s daughter, Mia Threapleton’s nun Liesl. For Cera, The Phoenician Scheme was a chance to work with a filmmaker he’s long admired. “I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theatre… and watched Rushmore on a loop,” he tells Empire.
Anderson’s off-kilter comedic sensibilities proved a strong fit for Cera’s own – right down to that costume (see above), and jaunty European vocal inflections. “I wanted it to be kind of a playful accent,” says Cera. “We had to find the right calibration of it where it’s not embarrassing or ridiculous.” As well as working with a dialogue coach, he had a Norwegian friend record the lines to help ground him in the right sounds. “I don’t know whether Norwegians will be, like, vomiting when they hear this,” Cera jokes. Still, this isn’t real-world Norwegian – it’s Wes Anderson-world Norwegian.