Michael Cera says Rihanna 'sent me flying' with 'This Is the End' slap (original) (raw)
Let it be known that Michael Cera suffers for his craft. If one can call getting pimp-slapped by Rihanna suffering.
Cera recently sat down with GQ to discuss his most iconic roles, including his scene-stealing cameo as an unhinged, coked-up version of himself in the raucous 2013 comedy This Is the End.
Cera recalled being late to arrive on set as he was finishing up another job, but he was easily able to slip into character from all the awful things people had been saying about the fictional Michael Cera he plays in the film.
Michael Cera and Rihanna in 'This Is the End'. Suzanne Hanover/Sony Pictures/Everett
"It was really just all there for me, I just had to live up to what they're saying," Cera said. "I had to be weird."
And weird he is. When he's not busy blowing rails, or blowing cocaine in the face of his Superbad costars, Cera has the audacity to slap the butt of global treasure and future mother of two Rihanna. Who, in typical Rihanna fashion, is having none of it.
"Yeah, I mean she definitely hit me," Cera recalled. "But I really, I wanted that, you know? I mean, I think it's a lot funnier and a lot more convincing."
Noting that "a fake slap just doesn't look good," Cera admitted that the "Bitch Betta Have My Money" singer smacked him "hard."
"She really sent me flying, and it was great," he told GQ. "And now it's on film forever, this pain that I experienced."
The RiRi slap wasn't originally in the script, Seth Rogen revealed around the time of the film's premiere. Cera was scripted to slap her on the ass, but when he asked the pop star if he could slap her on the ass for real, she agreed as long as she could slap him in the face. For real.
They filmed that slap three or four times, and on the fourth take Rihanna really wailed on the Arrested Development actor.
"She cupped his ear and actually whacked out his equilibrium and he had to go lay down in his trailer for around half an hour," Rogen — who starred in, co-wrote, and co-directed This Is the End — previously told Sway's Universe.
"That's the take we used in the movie. We didn't add any sound to that or anything," Rogen added, noting that Cera "was concussed, I think."
Now that's commitment. Take a note, Daniel Day-Lewis.
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