Michael Cera's Still Fighting For “Scott Pilgrim”

Will Michael Cera’s workouts finally pay off?

With a Blue-Ray and DVD release this week, Cera’s hoping that “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” will find a wider audience than the much-devoted cult following that initially embraced director Edgar Wright’s innovative action-fest/romantic comedy/comic book adaption – if only to justify how hard he and his castmates trained for the over-the-top fight sequences.

“I don't think I could do a movie just because there were fight scenes – unless it was guaranteed to be hugely successful,” he trademark-deadpanned for PopcornBiz, before adding “I had a blast.”

“I loved doing it,” Cera said of the intensive two-month-long fight training sessions the cast tackled together before filming. “It was so much fun getting on set and putting a harness on and having to be alert first thing in the morning – unless you would miss an opportunity to duck and get hit in the head or something.”

“It was just something about the energy of when we were all training together,” he said. “It was a really fun way to get in shape and be able to learn how to do all this stuff. I think by the end of it we were all pretty ready to not ever move. We all wanted to just lay on the couch for a good four months.

“I never felt more confident – well, maybe I have,” he added. “Then after we started shooting, none of us continued to train, so you can watch us slowly fall apart over the course of five months of shooting…Now I kind of miss it and hopefully I’ll get a reason to get in shape like that again, and have somebody pay me to learn all that stuff. That’s what’s so kind of mind boggling about the whole thing, is we get paid to do that.”

Cera’s co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead had it rougher than most, suffering through tendonitis and a freak spinal injury she unknowingly experienced just prior to her training. “I was just kind of a mess,” she laughed. “But it was really kind of cool because I feel way, way stronger now than I did before I did the film – It’s a unique experience to go through.”

Director Wright also joined in the fight club, learning to battle alongside co-stars – and once-and-future superheroes – Brandon Routh and Chris Evans. “It’s not often you get to work out with Superman and Captain America,” he chuckled.

The “Scott Pilgrim” training sessions documented on the home video’s exhaustive behind-the-scenes features reveal how the cast and crew grew tighter during the process. “It was a great bonding experience because actually a lot of the didn’t actually have scenes with each other,” said Wright, “so it was nice to have all of the cast together for such a long period before shooting which doesn’t usually happen. Most films, the people meet the night before the first day of shooting, if that.”

Contact Us