Everyone is talking about Margot Robbie and her approach to playing Barbie, or Ryan Gosling and his portrayal of Toxic Masculinity Ken, but the real star of Barbie is actually the least-liked Barbie of all: Allan. He holds so many mysteries.
In Barbie, Michael Cera portrays Allan, the controversial icon who was initially supposed to be Ken’s friend but ended up just sort of fading into the background when Ken’s big personality takes over. Allan’s character actually ends up helping the Barbies when they need it most, proving that sometimes, you just need Michael Cera to show up and everything will be okay. But there was a brief time when Cera was almost left out of the production.
“It was a kind of very last-minute casting,” Cera explained in a new interview with GQ. “My manager got a call checking on my availability for it, and he called me and he said, ‘I got a call about this movie. It’s the Barbie movie. Greta Gerwig’s directing it, and it’s filming in London for four months of something, so I told them you probably wouldn’t want to to do it because you probably don’t want to go to London.’” This is when Cera could have fired his manager, but instead, he took matters into his own hands and reached out to Gerwig directly.
“I somehow got Greta’s email address,” Cera said. “I emailed her like, ‘Can I be in it? Can I do that part?’And she was like, ‘Let’s get on a Zoom right now. Here’s a Zoom link, I’ll be on there for the next hour.’ So she was just hanging out on the Zoom, like, ‘Click the link whenever you’re ready.’ And then we talked about it, and it just all happened really fast from there.” From there, Allan was brought to life, and history was born. Could you imagine someone else playing Allan? Nobody would do him justice.
Cera added, “Allan is a sad figure. He’s just a person that doesn’t really have any place in the world,” he explained. Because of this, Allan was yanked from shelves in the early 2000s. “It just wasn’t selling. The world just didn’t need for Ken to have a friend… Barbie is good, we can get a lot more Barbies in here, and friends of hers. But we’ve got Ken, and we don’t need to go deeper in that direction. So Allan fell by the wayside a little bit.” Actually, maybe we do need an Allan origin story.
Even though Allan didn’t play a pivotal role in the Real World, Cera certainly played an important part in the movie, even if he wasn’t really part of the Barbie group chat. Still, there is only one Allan!!