Michael Cera and Jonah Hill: From 'Superbad' to Superstars?
These two young comedy stars are McLovin the spotlight.
By Stephen Saito

Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad
Melissa Moseley/Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
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Michael Cera and Jonah Hill have been, literally, towering over Hollywood for the last two months. Yes, their film Superbad, a super-funny comedy of underage beer runs and obsessive penis sketching produced by Knocked Up mastermind Judd Apatow, has been the talk of the town this summer, but, more specifically, Cera and Hill are featured on larger-than-life billboards scattered all over Los Angeles that take up the kind of air space usually reserved for A-List stars.
"Judd noticed that Michael has a bigger bulge than me in the picture," laments Hill while waiting for the Superbad presentation at Comic-Con. "I feel like it was just the pants weren't as flattering as Michael's pants."
"Mine were corduroys, yours were weird," replies an unsympathetic Cera as he fiddles around with a video camera he plans to film the event with.
"Yeah, [he was wearing] cords and I feel like [he's saying], 'Look, check out this bulge in these jeans,'" Hill says. "If those were the pants I was wearing…"
As the battle of the bulge rages on, nearly 6,500 people inside the San Diego Convention Center await the duo — which is amazing considering that, only a year ago, Cera and Hill seemed to have more in common with the guys waiting in line to get in than the featured attraction. But even though neither have headlined a film before, both have considerable comedy cred. Cera found success in Arrested Development, the criminally unwatched and brutally cancelled Fox TV comedy in which he played the contemplative George Michael, whose crush on his cousin Maeby was one of the show's hallmarks. Meanwhile, Hill became a fixture with little parts on the big screen ever since asking Catherine Keener how much he had to shell out for some goldfish boots in The 40–Year-Old Virgin.
"Last year, I was here with a different movie," says Hill, who came to the 2006 convention with the college comedy Accepted and could enjoy watching someone else handing out fliers dressed as a hot dog. "Now, the movies I would be most psyched to go see, we're actually in."
Even though the chemistry between Cera and Hill is easy, the road to Superbad was not. It all began when two best friends from Vancouver named Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg sat through a particularly bad run of movies when they were 13. Rogen says, "we just decided let's try to write a funny movie that we would love to see. We wrote a very bad, dirty movie and then rewrote it for 15 years."

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