Jonah Hill and Michael Cera flirt with stardom -- and flout civility -- in the raunchy high-school romp Superbad.

witness Borys Kit photography Glen Wilson

Like so many memorable comedy duos (think Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis), Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are a study in contrasts. Hill is pudgy and pushy, with a mind in the gutter and a mouth to match. Cera, skinny and shy, with a seemingly congenital inability to relax, is the uptight superego to Hill’s unbridled id. Their comic sensibilities are as counterpoised as their physical and behavioral characteristics: Hill, who never met a dick joke he didn’t like, revels in pushing the limits of decorum; Cera, a master of the comedy of discomfort, lives for those excruciating moments of silence in the aftermath of Everest-sized social faux pas.
All of which made Hill, twenty-three, and Cera, nineteen, ideal casting choices for Superbad, an in-your-face farce that takes a hoary teen-flick trope -- the last night of partying before high school graduation -- and pushes it to new heights (or depths, depending on your perspective) of vulgarity. The film’s deft balance of hard-R crudity and touching -- but, mercifully, not cloying -- sentiment is consistent with its pedigree. It was produced by Judd Apatow, writer-director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and co-written by Knocked Up star Seth Rogen and his best friend Evan Goldberg, who based it on their own adolescent misadventures.

But the real secret to Superbad’s success is the interplay between its hapless trio of misfits: horny Seth, played by Hill, hyper-cautious Evan, played by Cera, and gawky, geeky Fogell, played by newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- in comparison to whom Hill and Cera are grizzled veterans. In the past two years Hill, who also writes screenplays, has scored memorable roles in such films as Click, Accepted, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Evan Almighty. Cera, meanwhile, earned praise for his performance as George-Michael Bluth, the awkward teen with a crush on his cousin in the late, great TV series Arrested Development. More recently, he and buddy Clark Duke have written, produced and starred in Clark and Michael, a series of humorous online shorts about trying to break into show business, and he has been cast in the big-screen comedy Year One, starring Jack Black.

Jonah Hill: One aspect of celebrity is that there is a noticeable difference with strange women. Women that are strangers. But I am too neurotic and cerebral to enjoy that. I’m more of a “having a girlfriend” kind of guy.

Michael Cera: Me, too. It’s too bad we’re like that because –

Hill: Most guys in our situation would be enjoying it a lot more.

Cera: We need to find a way to cope with this. It’s going to be --

Hill: You’re so worried about sex being handed to you all the time?

Cera: I’m just saying, it’s going to be intensified. You’re going to have to gel your hair.

Hill: I just hope to meet a real rad girl who doesn’t give a shit if I’m in movies or not.

Cera: My goal is to meet my wife on this tour.

Hill: You could use those Canadian health benefits as a drawing card.

Cera: Our kids could have joint citizenship.

Hill: The strangest thing is to be driving around and seeing a huge billboard with me on it. [Because of] Knocked up and Evan Almighty, people do recognize me more, but really the billboard with my face on it is the strangest thing that has happened so far. Being in the car at a stoplight, and glancing over and seeing it, and looking at the person in the car next to you look at you and then the billboard…

Cera: Has that really happened to you?

Hill: Yes. I’m almost uncomfortable. It makes me feel weird.

Cera: It’s like you’re caught naked or something.

Hill: What’s really great for us is that it’s the first movie that both of us are the stars of, and it’s good, not shitty That’s the best feeling ever…

Cera: That’s a good point.

Hill: Because imagine having our faces on the billboards and the movie sucks.

Cera: We’re about to go talk about it for the next three months [on the press tour], and what if you didn’t like it? What if we didn’t get along? You don’t realize when you commit to a movie that you’re signing yourself up for the next two years of your life.

Hill: And the rest of your life, people associating that movie with you.

Cera: This is the first movie I’ve done, so I don’t know what it’s like to do something you’re not proud of, but I imagine it can’t be great.

Hill: It’s not. [Laughs] When Cera is laughing, when Seth is laughing, I know I’m on the right track because they don’t laugh at stuff that’s not funny. You’re not going to hear me laughing at a joke Cera makes if it’s not funny.

Cera: There’s no point in fake laughing on set.

Hill: And the good thing about being friends is that nobody is going to get offended when someone says, “Try something else, that wasn’t funny.” When someone else says it to me, I might get pissed, but if someone like Cera says it, or Seth…

Cera: They won’t just say, “This isn’t working”; they have something else for you to try.

Hill: When we’re rewriting a scene, it’s like six people standing around pitching ideas. What Judd’s taught me is, when you’re making a movie and you get into the editing room, the thing that you write might be hilarious. But you shoot that, and you shoot a million different versions because let’s say you’re in the test screening and you have only one version of a scene, and it bombs at the test screening, then you’re fucked. You have nothing else to draw from. But if you have twenty other versions of that scene, you can test each one to see which one works the best. It’s basically like just being paranoid. That’s the idea behind it: “Holy shit, what if this isn’t funny?”

Cera: And as an actor, we rehearsed a bit beforehand, and once you feel comfortable with the character, [once] you feel like you have ownership over it, and [once] you get to know other people, you can [deviate] from the script and say whatever you want and it still ends up funny.

Hill: What Judd figured out is: Hire smart people and trust them to do a good job. So for someone like me, Judd has given every opportunity to me out of the kindness of his heart. He hires people he trusts, and then trusts them to do a good job. He’s not on their case. And the last thing you want to do when given a great opportunity is let that person down who gave it to you. So if Judd is letting me star in a big studio movie, the last thing I want to do is let him down and do a shitty job.

Cera: I, on the other hand, auditioned for the part.

Hill: What happened was, we were rehearsing for Knocked Up, and doing preliminary casting for Superbad, and ’cause I work with Judd and Seth all the time, we were all sitting around and watching tapes of kids. I was thought of as too old, so I wasn’t even considered for the movie.

So we were rehearsing for Knocked Up and they were [asking], “What do you think of this guy?” And “What do you think of that guy?” And Cera’s tape came on and Judd and Seth weren’t familiar with Arrested Development and I was, and I was like, “Oh, man, that’s George Michael from Arrested Development. That guy is fucking incredible. You guys are retarded if you don’t hire him.” So they knew Cera was going to play one of the parts.

Cera: Actually, Evan, who co-wrote the movie with Seth, had seen Arrested Development once, and he stopped because of watching me. He specifically stopped watching because of me. That’s a true story. He told me that when we all first hung out. “I gotta tell ya, I watched the show and I specifically didn’t like it because of you.” And I ended up playing him.

Hill: And we were shooting Knocked Up one day, and they were reading guys for Seth’s part, and they were just defeated. They couldn’t find the person to play him. And Seth and I were standing outside of Seth’s trailer, just bullshitting, and Judd walks up all angry. He’d been casting and nothing had come out of it.

And he looks at me all weird, and I’m like, “What the fuck?” And he says, “How young could you look?” And I was like, “I don’t know, seventeen or eighteen?” And he was like, “Jonah, go shave in Seth’s trailer, and I want you and Seth to go make a tape.” We did, Judd went upstairs and went to [Columbia Pictures head] Amy Pascal’s office, and I was in Superbad. And I called Mike…

Cera: You were calling to tell me you had gotten the part and I didn’t even know I had gotten the part. You left me a message, and I have it saved on my phone -- I’ll play it for you. “Mike, it’s Jonah. Judd wanted me to call you and let you know we’re doing Superbad -- you’re Evan and I’m Seth. And it’s going to be great, man. Bye.”

Hill: What’s so great about Judd is that he gives the young people he finds responsibilities. And one of his things was, “It’s your responsibility to make sure that whenever Michael is in town, you guys hang out every day so you can become friends.”

Cera: We didn’t even have a choice whether we wanted to be friends. It was like an arranged marriage.

Hill: It was a lot like that. Luckily, from the second we met, we got along insanely well.

Cera: He’d come and pick me up and we’d go hang out together, play video games. I was worried because the first time we had dinner, we went with [Hill’s Accepted co-star] Justin [Long] to a sushi place, and it was interesting because people were telling us [we had] to go hang out. And it could have gone a lot of different ways.

Hill: The whole thing happened really organically. That’s what’s cool about our whole group. I’m writing two movies for two studios [“The Middle Child” for Universal and “Pure Imagination” for Sony], and it all happened super organically. I’ll be sitting around with Judd  and go, “Hey, I have this cool idea for a movie.” And he’ll be like, “Awright, cool.” And then a week later I’ll get a call going, “Hey, do you want to do it at Sony?” It’s not like we go to [some] studio head’s office and go, “Hey, we got a pitch!” And it happens because Judd has created a family; he’s created a familial aspect to his business. It’s just a great thing.

I wanted to be a writer for The Simpsons my entire life. I didn’t want to be an actor. I specifically didn’t want to be an actor. I essentially got discovered by Dustin Hoffman, I don’t know if I ever told you.

Cera: No.

Hill: I was in New York, going to college and learning how to write…better…learning how to write more better…and I was doing these spoken-word things. They were so serious, and that was pretty funny to me, and I just made a joke out of everything. I basically [decided], “Hey, I’m going to do one of these as a joke -- I’m going write a fake one,” and started doing them. And they became popular. Half the audience thought they were real, half the audience knew they were fake,

Cera: Really?

Hill: So it kinda got a small following when I was eighteen, almost nineteen. And then I became friends with Jake and Becky Hoffman, Dustin’s kids. And we were friends, and they thought it was really funny, what I was doing, and they were like, “You should meet our dad.” And whenever he’d come to New York, we’d go to dinner and hang out. And I would crank call his friends. Rich guys who owned hotels and stuff. And he would sit in the other room and laugh his ass off.

And then, I went back to L.A. for the summer, and I was working for my friend Max’s brother, and he worked in the music business, and I was making boxes and shit. It was the worst job ever, making boxes. And Dustin called me up on my cellphone one day and said, “Come meet me at this house in Brentwood.” So I asked my boss if I could leave, and he was like, “Why?” [I said,] “Well, this is going to sound crazy, but I got to meet Dustin Hoffman in this house in Brentwood.” And I’m, like, the guy who makes boxes and shit! And he actually makes a funny joke, “Yeah, and I’ve got to meet Christopher Walken at Starbucks.” So I just quit that job and left. I was like, I’ll find another shitty job.” I don’t know how hard it is to find a job making boxes. So I go, and I get to the house, and I walk in and there’s Dustin, and David O. Russell, Jason Schwartzman and Lily Tomlin. And they are all reading the script to I Heart Huckabees.

Cera: I’ve never heard this story.

Hill: And they were listening to my crank calls CD when I walked in. And I almost shit my pants.

Cera: You made a CD of it?

Hill: Yeah. And I was shitting my pants.

Cera: Why?

Hill: Because all of my idols were sitting in one room listening to my shitty crank call CD that I had made. I talked to David in the other room, and the next day I auditioned, and then I Heart Huckabees was my first movie. So that’s how I got into acting.

Cera: I [started] acting in Toronto, and I had a Toronto agent, and my agent had joint clients with a management company in L.A. So they got me an audition for a Fox pilot called The Grubs, that got canceled.

Hill: And you were on the Care Bears in Canada.

Cera: Berenstain Bears. I was Brother Bear.

Hill: And you were young Sam Rockwell in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Cera: That was one of the first jobs. So I did eight episodes of Grubs, and then it got canceled. It was a Fox show, so I guess they knew me already, so the next year, the pilot for Arrested Development came around and I auditioned.

Hill: Cera has done what it takes years for most of us to figure out, which is that you kinda find your comedic voice and do what is hilarious. Like what [his character] George Michael had. It’s not broad; it’s quieter. It’s an impressive thing to watch. It’s subdued.

Cera: Jonah thinks of things quicker than I’ve ever seen anyone do.

Hill: I am generally not going to stick to what is written. When you’re acting and writing at the same time, you’ll say something that will trigger me to say something completely different, or I might say something that will get a reaction out of Cera that isn’t on the page. That’s what pisses me off about most movies. The conversations don’t seem natural. It looks like they just read it. You can see when someone is thinking of something.

Cera: That’s why all those Christopher Guest movies are so good.

Hill: Exactly. And when done in the right way, and Judd and [director Greg] Mottola have figured what to do, it really works. Even if someone is a brilliant actor, the brilliance in the acting is making it seem like they just thought of what they were saying. Most [actors] are just waiting for their turn to talk. And with [the] improvisation [we did in] Superbad, what you can see is that there is not a moment where you have Cera waiting for me to finish so he can say his line.

Cera: There’s a scene in the film where we have this huge argument, and the whole thing was off page. We had the points, but [the script] was really just a guide.

Hill: We were having a real fight.

Cera: That scene looks really intense. It looks like we were really thrown off by things.

Hill: And that is the result of improvisation. I can’t wait to do a dramatic movie and hopefully have it be improvised because that scene made me realize that the best scenes can come from complete improvisation. It doesn’t have to be just comedy.

The whole thing in the movie is that scene is crucial to our friendship. We’re saying all that shit that we’ve been keeping inside for years [about] each other. The goal was for me to hurt Cera and for Cera to hurt me. It was like being in an argument with someone you love; you’re saying the thing that will hurt them the most.

Cera: I don’t need to hide my love for [Jonah].

Hill: I love all my friends. There’s nothing wrong with two men loving each other.

Cera: No matter what time of day.