Nowadays, it's almost customary for any movie cast or ensemble to create a group chat while working on a project — and Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie would be no exception. However, not all cast members of the doll film participated in the rite of passage: Michael Cera, who plays Allan Sherwood in the movie, was left out of the Barbie cast group chat for the most Y2K reason we've ever encountered, and it's low-key worthy of praise.
While speaking with People at the Barbie premiere in Los Angeles on July 9, actor Simu Liu — who plays a Ken in the movie — revealed that “all the Barbies and Kens got in a group chat," but Cera wasn't in it.
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It's not that Cera didn't want to join in the fun of bonding with his castmates over text, or that he was purposefully excluded because he's, well, Allan and not a Ken — he literally could not. Why? Well, because he's cooler than all of us and has a flip phone. And, no, we are not talking about one of those new glitzy and glamorous flip phones, à la Samsung's Galaxy X Z Flip. Michael Cera uses an actual, practical, sturdy flip phone daily.
"I don't have an iPhone myself. I have a flip phone," Cera shared after People asked about him being left out of the chat, which Liu said was created shortly after leading Barbie Margot Robbie threw an IRL sleepover for all the Barbies in town (without existential crises, we hope). However, Cera doesn't feel like he missed out on anything from not being included in the GC. In fact, he believes it aligned entirely with his character in the film.
"I still think I wouldn't belong on [the group chat] anyway, because [my character] Allan is sort of in his own little world," the actor elaborated. "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." (See what we mean about Cera being a real Y2K icon?)
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If you've been following Cera for a while, you probably already knew about the flip phone. He showed off his phone back in 2022 during an appearance on On With Mario Lopez. During the segment, the actor also opened up about his reasoning for not having a smartphone. "I already feel overwhelmed keeping up with text messages, so if I had everything…" the actor explained, drifting off as if to suggest it would be too much of a mental hurdle.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, Cera further admitted that not having a smartphone was a "conscious choice" since he "had an early aversion to them." He explained: “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 sat there lonely and bored.”
Hey, we get it — and it takes a lot of power and courage to give up the 5G life, so we commend Cera. It just adds to his charm. There's only one Allan in the Barbie universe, and there's certainly only one Michael Cera in ours.
