NEW YORK — Brooklyn currently has a love affair with facial hair, is awash with hipsters, tons of kale — and now 100 percent more Michael Cera.
The 26-year-old star of “Juno” and “Superbad” has relocated to the cool New York borough after several years in which he would visit the city and then feel sad when it was time to go home to Los Angeles.
“I was not really enjoying living in L.A. Aside from all my friends out there, the city didn’t really fit me, I thought. And vice versa,” he says. “I always loved New York. I always wanted to live here since I was a kid.”
The move makes sense. If you think about it, Cera has always seemed more of a New Yorker — intellectual, arty, low-key, slyly cynical — than the plastic pretty boys over on the other coast.
The move coincides with Cera exploring new artistic expressions — the release of an indie folk album and his Broadway debut, all this summer. “Yeah, it’s a few things happening at once,” he says, humbly and yet guarded.
The play he’s chosen is as comfortable a fit with many of Cera previous film roles as an old T-shirt. It’s Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth,” a portrait of adrift, privileged post-adolescents that co-stars Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson.
Cera plays Warren, a nerdish rich kid who shows up at his friend Dennis’s Manhattan apartment in 1982 with $15,000 he has stolen from his menacing father. They come up with a dangerous plan to not only return the money and avoid punishment, but also to party.
The script calls Warren “a strange barking-dog of a kid with large tracts of thoughtfulness in his personality” who is “just beginning to find beneath his natural eccentricity a dogged self-possession.” In other words, not too much of a stretch.
Cera says he had no doubts he could work onstage. “I would have doubts if it were something different, something completely outside of my wheelhouse. Like a musical, or something. Or, I don’t know, Shakespeare.”
The play over the years has featured such actors as Mark Ruffalo, Josh Hamilton, Matt Damon, Colin Hanks, Chris Klein, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anna Paquin. Cera and Culkin first performed the play in Australia in 2012 and added Gevinson and director Anna D. Shapiro for a pre-Broadway run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company this summer.
“It was definitely really scary the first few times at Steppenwolf,” he says. “But that kind of goes away. You get used to having an audience, I think. Your body gets used to that in a weird way.”
Cera’s also revealed his inner songwriter, quietly releasing an 18-song album on his Bandcamp website on Aug. 8. It’s a collection of airy, folky tracks, some just wordless fragments, some more fully fleshed out.
“The music thing is not a particular ambition or something. It’s just something I do at home,” he says. “I didn’t think that many people would find it or hear it because the Internet is such a sea, a blizzard of stuff.”
The album costs $7 to download and Cera says some people have paid. “There is a kind of pride in making money on something you did totally by yourself. It’s like busking or something. It’s honest.”
