Michael Cera wasn’t on the ‘Barbie’ group chat because he has a flip phone

Christopher Rosen
·3 min read
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The “Barbie” press tour has reached its personal device stage. In a story covered Friday by countless news sites – and now this very publication – it was revealed “Barbie” star Michael Cera missed out on the cast’s group chat and its related antics because he doesn’t own a smartphone.

“I don’t have an iPhone myself. … I have a flip phone,” Cera told People as part of its new special issue on the Greta Gerwig feature. “But I still think I wouldn’t belong on [the group chat] anyway, because [my character] Allan is sort of in his own little world. Greta’s gift for me when I arrived was a picture disc of NSYNC’s ‘No Strings Attached,’ which felt like somehow a real guiding light in the backstory of this character.”

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In a cast full of Kens like Ryan Gosling and Barbies like Margot Robbie, Cera is an outlier. Allan was a toy first introduced by Mattel in 1964 and, as noted in a recent New Yorker story on the toy company, the doll was marketed as “Ken’s buddy.” A tagline used to sell Allan toys focused on Ken: “All of Ken’s clothes fit him!”

Speaking to The New Yorker, Gerwig noted that Mattel wasn’t super high on the idea of Allan being part of “Barbie” due to the toy’s failure decades earlier. “There was just an e-mail that went around where they said, ‘Do you have to remind people that this was on the box?’” Gerwig said. 

The director and co-writer added, however, that showcasing some of the missteps in Barbie history helped honor the toy brand. “Barbie seems so monolithic, and there’s a quality where it just seems as if she was inevitable, and she’s always existed. I think all the dead ends are a reminder that they were just trying stuff out,” she told the publication. “Dealing with all the strangeness of it is a way of honoring it.”

As for Cera, this is the second time this year he’s made headlines for not having a smartphone. (People are really invested in what kind of phone the “Superbad” star uses!) Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in February, Cera said not owning an iPhone or similar device was a “conscious choice.”

“I feel a bit of fear about it honestly like I’d really lose control of my waking life,” he said. “Right when people started having smartphones when it was Blackberries, I had lunch with a friend of mine who was my best friend at the time, and he’d just gotten a Blackberry, and for the whole meal he was typing emails, and I was sat there lonely and bored. So I had an early aversion to them.”

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