Michael Cera Discovers Opening Night Gifts Are a Thing at Broadways This Is Our Youth

Publish date: 2024-09-08

You can forgive Kenneth Lonergan for being a little emotional at the Sept. 11 opening of “This Is Our Youth” on Broadway.

At the performance, which stars Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson, he ran into the actors who starred in the original Off Broadway staging in 1996 — Mark Ruffalo and Josh Hamilton.

“I burst into tears,” said Lonergan, heading in to the afterparty at the Bowery Hotel. “I thought, ‘This was my youth!'”

Both Culkin and Cera have done the play before (in Sydney in 2012), but it was helpful to have Lonergan around this time as a regular presence during rehearsals. For one thing, he could tell stories about the real-life friends on whom he based the characters in “Youth.”

“He got a text from the guy he based my character on, and it said, ‘Tell Culkin that inside that asshole there’s a poet.’ “

Culkin also ribbed Cera, fast friends since “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World,” for not adhering to the theater tradition of giving opening night gifts.

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In Cera’s defense, he didn’t know opening night gifts were a thing. “I’m gonna come in on like Sept. 28, or some other random date, with a ton of presents and I’ll be like, ‘I don’t need an excuse to buy people gifts!’ ” he vowed.

Gevinson, the teenager who became a media darling when she started an online fashion magazine, had a great time working with both her co-stars. “I feel like I learned a lot from them, but mostly about how to play Mario Kart,” she cracked.

(Pictured: Kieran Culkin, Tavi Gevinson and Michael Cera at the Broadway opening of “This Is Our Youth”)

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