Michael Cera gets honest about first interaction with Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise jokingly told off Michael Cera before they even met properly.

While Cera has been an actor since he was a kid, he still made the mistake of talking during a take and got a reaction from the Top Gun star.

During the June 24 episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast, the Year One star recalled meeting Cruise to film pretaped segments for 2010’s MTV Movie Awards.

“It was surreal to work with Tom Cruise. It was fascinating,” Cera recalled.

Sharing insight into working with the film star, he said, “Tom, like, runs the set. I was really there for, like, five minutes, but what I observed was like he was like the first [assistant director] on the set. … It was his thing. He was such a leader.”

Cera, however, soon found himself getting called out by Cruise, who was seemingly in unofficial director mode.

“The first moment I had with him, I arrived, they were shooting and I was talking to the writer … we were just kind of mumbling while they were shooting, but they could hear us,” Cera explained.

“It was just, like, 40 feet away, and Tom Cruise looks at me — I’ve never met him, they’re in the middle of a take — and he looks and he goes, ‘Is that Michael Cera talking during a f***in’ take?’ He was joking, but it was also like, ‘Do shut up.’ It was so surreal.”

“And then I met him and he was like, ‘Talking during a f***in’ take,’” Cera recounted.

The actor added, “I knew he was playing around, so I was like, ‘It wasn’t me, it was the writer!’ He was like, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding.’ I was like, ‘ … I’m kidding too.’”

Michael Cera’s fans can see him in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, which also stars Benicio del Toro.