Michael Cera is kind of a big deal. The actor best known for movies including Juno, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Barbie, plus TV's Arrested Development, has been working professionally since the late '90s.
Still, he swears that screen legend Jackie Chan — who's very much a big deal and has been working internationally since the '60s — had no idea who he was when he introduced himself recently at BBC Radio 2 in London.
Courtesy of TPS Productions/Focus Features
It started innocently enough, when a photographer told Cera, who was promoting The Phoenician Scheme, that Chan was down the hall touting his own movie, The Karate Kid: Legends.
"She asked if I knew Jackie Chan, which I don't, so she said 'come meet him,'" Cera explained to NME. "That was that."
But the encounter didn't feel like two actors saying hello.
"When I met him though, he was like 'who is this person, what's going on?'" Cera said of the Rush Hour star. "We took a picture but I think he thought I was a competition winner. He was like, 'OK let's do a picture real quick. Come on.' Not rudely. But I felt like I was invading his little personal time with his team before he goes on the radio. So I was like, 'What am I doing here?' But everyone was very sweet and I got to meet Jackie."
Cera also spoke about some other people he'd like to meet: The Beatles. The group's only surviving members are Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, after the 1980 assassination of John Lennon and George Harrison's 2001 death from cancer.
"It would be cool but also strange," said Cera, who released an album in 2014. "I don’t know what I'd say. It would be weird to say anything. They’d be so bored by whatever I had to say, because they’ve heard it eight billion times from every other person on the planet. It must be hard to be a Beatle."
Cera's movie, the latest from director Wes Anderson, opens wide June 6.
