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Superbad casting director Allison Jones—an Emmy winner for Freaks and Geeks and Veep (twice)—facilitated the first meeting between Hill and Judd Apatow. The filmmaker promptly gave Hill his big break as a strange dude drawn to a pair of disco platforms in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which led to bigger and better things in the Apatow cinematic universe.
"Allison doesn't just find us actors," Apatow, a producer on Superbad, told the New Yorker in 2015. "She finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives."
Still, writer-producer Seth Rogen remembered to GQ in 2020 that, as funny as they knew Hill to be from Knocked Up, they originally thought that at 23 he was too old for Superbad. But after Hill made a quick video of himself reading lines "and it was just so funny," Rogen said, "we were like, 'Oh, we were wrong, he could totally do this very well.'"
Rogen recalled to The Ringer in 2017 that it was Jay Baruchel who randomly suggested—"We were in f--king Las Vegas, New Mexico, sitting in a hotel room, smoking weed"—that he put Cera in his movie.
And at the audition, Apatow said, "no one was as funny as Cera."
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