Paul Rudd was photographed May 21 at Spring Studios in New York. Styling by Michael Fisher. Tom Ford shirt, belt, pants. Photographed by Beau Grealy; Grooming: Rheanne White By the time Paul Rudd arrived at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts during the early ’90s, he’d ditched his mother’s gold lamé pants but still had a mop of hair plunging down his back, and his sartorial choices hardly screamed “everyman.”
His ambition: “Serious acting.” His air quotes, not mine.
Hanging on his wall as inspiration was a rhapsodic review of My Left Foot, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis his first Oscar for playing a guy with cerebral palsy. He was Rudd’s favorite actor — “Still is,” he says — and, having watched the film, he was convinced that that was “exactly the kind of actor” that he wanted to be.
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Fendi sweater. Photographed by Beau Grealy But as graduation neared, Rudd was invited to sit down with a Hollywood agent. “I wanted to be this dangerous, brooding, incredible actor … then I have this meeting and she says, ‘You’re going to need to cut your hair,’ ” he recalls. He was incredulous at the time. “She goes, ‘Well, you’re not an edgy guy, you’re more of an all-American type, and they’re going to want you clean-cut.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that is not who I am. That’s the last thing I want to hear.’ “
At 57, Rudd has come to terms with who Hollywood wants him to be. In fact, he has built a long and successful career being that guy. And though he’s found ways to spackle in considerably darker roles onstage, to which he’s retreated whenever he can, his goofy, good-guy charisma has fueled three decades’ worth of rom-coms (Clueless), R-rated comedies (I Love You, Man) and, most recently, a lengthy spin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He’s been called the “MSG of actors” by The New York Times, which noted: “You can add Rudd to any movie, and the movie will taste better.”
His next project, Power Ballad, from Sing Street‘s John Carney, is arguably a departure. Out June 5, the film stars Rudd, opposite Nick Jonas, as an aging musician who never got the rock-star life or career that his younger self had envisioned. Instead, he met his wife, had a child and settled in as the lead singer of The Bride & Groove — “Ireland’s grooviest wedding band,” according to the decal on their van. Rudd took the role in part because he identified with the wistful character.
“I mean, I don’t think I’m completely like what people might think I’m like. I’m not just a happy-go-lucky dude,” he says, then grows quiet.
I press for more.
“Well, I can get pretty depressed,” he offers, tentative at first. “But we’re all multi-dimensional, right? We all feel things deeply. We all get pretty sad about stuff. We all have those moments where you wake up at 3 in the morning and your mind is racing and it’s the noise of the world and your life and ‘How am I going to get on with all of this?’ I feel that, too. I just don’t ever talk about that in interviews.”
Now that he’s started, however …
***
Givenchy shirt, pants; Everlane tee; Moscot sunglasses. Photographed by Beau Grealy On this early May afternoon, Rudd is meeting me at a diner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He’s just back from a few days without his phone, which was purely accidental, he says, but liberating nonetheless. I arrive first and ask the maître d’ which seat Rudd would prefer, to which he laughs. “Oh, Paul sits anywhere,” he says, the implication subtle but clear: He’s not “Movie Star Paul Rudd” here.
The truth is, Rudd ditched L.A. for the sort of regular-guy existence that New York affords right after making Clueless during the mid-’90s. As far as his reps were concerned, it was an astonishingly stupid career move. By the time the coming-of-age comedy captured the zeitgeist and minted Rudd a thinking-girl’s heartthrob in the summer of 1995, he’d already turned his attention to a stage production of The Last Night of Ballyhoo. Suddenly, he was 3,000 miles from Hollywood and utterly unavailable. “My agent was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ” he says, “but I was so excited. I was 25 or 26, and I was about to be on Broadway.”
It wasn’t even the first time that he’d left his reps baffled by his choices. Rudd had landed a recurring role on the popular drama series Sisters a few years before Clueless, then bailed to study classic English drama at Oxford. “It was my first real acting job, and my agent thought I was insane for leaving then, too,” says Rudd. “Honestly, everyone was like, ‘You’ve actually got a job, and now you’re going to go back to school to learn to do something to hopefully get a job?’ ” But he wasn’t thinking in those terms. Rudd was focused on developing the skills that he’d need for what would hopefully be a long career. All of his heroes had formal training, and he intended to follow in their footsteps.
“I was also very aware of what I liked and what I found to be moving, so I was looking through the lens of, like, ‘Is this something Tom Waits would find cool? Is this something Elvis Costello would do?’ ” he says. “But as a career goes on, and you age and get more successful, that lens gets cloudier.”
Between whatever lighthearted comedy Rudd was the face of, he’d work in a play from Neil LaBute or someone else. He loved the tight-knit community and the credibility that the theater provided. “People took you a little more seriously, like, ‘Oh, you’re not one of those guys who just lives in L.A. and wants to get famous,’ ” he says. “And my favorite thing about doing a play, and I used to do one a year, was that it felt so far away from the movie industry and it was really connecting to what it was that I loved about this.”
Plus, he didn’t have to play the everyman onstage. He was portraying an irresponsible, womanizing alcoholic in a West End production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night 25-plus years ago when he met his dear friend Olivia Colman. “That this gorgeous, kind, affable person could play against type wasn’t a surprise to me,” she says of Rudd, who’d regularly crash on the floor of her “shitty flat in South London” during that period. “But the theater’s always been much more able to see past the hello you give when you walk through the door.”
In those days, Rudd was equally clear on what he didn’t want to do, which included things like pilot season, the annual ritual where hundreds of actors descend on L.A. to try out for the year’s new crop of TV shows. He wasn’t interested in the exercise, nor was he eager to get on a series. “I was terrified of landing something that might be visible,” he says, “something that might pigeonhole me and make me famous before I really knew enough to be able to sustain a career.” He spent the entirety of his early ’90s run on the Fox sitcom Wild Oats scared to death it would become a hit. (Spoiler: It lasted only four episodes.) With hindsight, he says he’s grateful for the experience, mostly because it taught him what he didn’t want out of his career.
“I look back at that kid who was like, ‘No, I’m moving to New York and turning down these job offers’ — my God, I would even audition for things, get them and then be like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that’ — and I’m envious of the clarity that I had then,” says Rudd, who found other ways to pay rent, including a stint as a bar mitzvah DJ. “But I didn’t have dependents then. My life and considerations were very different.”
Gucci shirt; Everlane tee; Brunello Cucinelli pants; Adidas X Gucci sneakers Photographed by Beau Grealy ***
For years, the lock screen on Rudd’s phone was the 20th Century Fox logo with the swirling spotlight and, in place of the studio name, three simple words: “No One Cares.” It served as his reminder not to take any of this too seriously: the gig, the upset, the competition. “Ninety-nine percent of the world doesn’t give a fuck about the movie industry anyway,” he says. “They don’t even see these things.”
At the same time, Rudd has been chasing one form of acceptance or another for as long as he can remember. He believes it began when his younger sister was born, and suddenly he was vying for the attention of his ad industry mom and airline executive dad. “I realized if I could do a little dance or something, they’d say, ‘Oh, look at our kid!’ and I liked that, so I just kept doing it,” he says. “And that’s what I’m still doing — it has nothing to do with ‘the craft’; you’re just doing whatever you can to get people to like you and say, ‘You’re cute, you’re funny, you’re doing a good job.’ ”
As the new kid in Kansas City, Kansas, and arguably the only one in class with British-born Jewish parents, Rudd found that humor was the quickest route to acceptance. By the time he moved to L.A. for acting school, he’d added other colors. Adam Scott, who was two years behind him, insists that everyone there seemed to understand that Rudd was poised for stardom, and not just because he’d landed a Nintendo commercial right out of school, though that was a big deal.
“I was at the premiere of Clueless out in Malibu with him, and it comes up on this big screen on the beach, and immediately I was like, ‘Oh, Paul’s going to be a famous person now,’ ” says the Severance star, who remains one of Rudd’s closest friends. “And sure enough, everything changed after that.” The velvet ropes parted. “Suddenly, we could just walk into any bar. It was like, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is going on? This is incredible.’ “
Despite its impact on his career, Rudd didn’t fight for his role in Clueless. In fact, he was considerably more interested in playing Cher’s clearly gay love interest, Christian, or Dionne’s boyfriend, Murray. He hadn’t realized the latter was written as a Black character. As for the former: “I remember reading it, like, ‘Wait a minute, this is a gay character, who’s also the coolest character in the movie? I’ve never seen this before and it’s the most interesting part,’ ” he says. The director, Amy Heckerling, let him read for that role as well as for Cher’s older, nerdier, ex-stepbrother turned love interest, Josh, which is the one he landed. “But after the audition was done,” he says, “I was not on the phone with my agents, like, ‘Did I get it? Did I get it?’ ”
It would be several more years before Rudd found a film that spoke to his sensibilities, which happened with Wet Hot American Summer. “I know Clueless was funny, but this was my kind of funny,” he says of the 2001 entry, a parody of ’80s-era summer camp and teen sex comedies. He felt it the minute he read the script, and his instincts were validated when he arrived at an actual summer camp to make the movie with a group that included Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper and Molly Shannon.
Wet Hot didn’t hit the way Clueless had, but it led to more comedies, including Anchorman, which Rudd says he obsessively chased in a way he’d never chased anything before. He didn’t even care what role he landed in the irreverent Will Ferrell comedy, so long as he was part of the cast. “I don’t really fight for many things,” says Rudd, “but I was a nuisance in my desperation to be part of that, and at a certain point I think I just wore them down.”
If Clueless made Rudd a heartthrob, Anchorman secured his spot in what became comedy’s new Brat Pack, alongside actors like Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel. (“I’m not the one people are really talking about,” Rudd argues, “but it’s like I’m always kind of there.”) Judd Apatow, the pack’s unofficial leader, was so charmed by Rudd — who, he says, “has this ability to play it completely straight and it can be rough and even heartbreaking but also really funny at the same time” — that he put him in his feature directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which came out the following summer. Apatow’s only request was that Rudd put on weight for the role. “I told him, ‘If you’re gorgeous, I don’t think it works as well,’ but then a week [into filming,] the studio had a bunch of notes and one of them was, ‘Why is Paul Rudd so overweight?’ ” Translation: Rudd is allowed to be funny, so long as he still looks like Josh from Clueless.
More cult comedies followed: Knocked Up, I Love You, Man and Our Idiot Brother among them. Hard-R laughs was not exactly the path that Rudd envisioned for himself, but he was having a blast. In fact, he just kept saying yes to the next project, and then the next one, and suddenly comedy was his lane. “And it’s not like I had all these job offers for that serial killer part,” he jokes. “So, maybe that agent was right. Maybe I don’t have any edge and this is what I was meant to do. But it’s also weird — sometimes with comedy, it’s looked at as a little more frivolous than the important movies and the important actors.”
Does that ever bother him?
“Nah, I made peace with that a hell of a long time ago,” he says. “I don’t give a shit.” He stops himself. Pauses. “I shouldn’t say that.”
Another pause. “I mostly don’t give a shit.” Then, the hint of a smile: “Part of me gives a shit.”
Saint Laurent trench, shirt, tie, pants, shoes. Photographed by Beau Grealy ***
In case this isn’t obvious, a Marvel superhero was never on Rudd’s vision board. In fact, he still finds it a tad absurd that he, the self-described “avatar for averageness,” was cast as one, though Marvel boss Kevin Feige insists he had everything that Ant-Man, a wisecracking thief turned reluctant hero, required. “We needed this guy to be a criminal but also someone that you’re rooting for no matter what, and that’s Paul,” says Feige. “He’s also funny and good-looking and unbelievably charismatic.”
Still, Rudd says he didn’t sign on because he was eager to be in a Marvel movie. “For me, it was the Edgar [Wright] angle,” he says. At the time, the British auteur was attached to direct the film, which he’d been developing for years already. “And I was excited, like, ‘You mean the Shaun of the Dead guy is doing this and he wants me to be in it? OK, this I can do — this is my lane.’ Then it obviously changed, pre-preproduction, but that was the overriding thought I had.”
Rather than drop out with Wright — which, per Feige, had been a very real concern — Rudd not only stuck with the project but recruited his Anchorman director, Adam McKay, to help him do a pass on the script. “The thought I had was, ‘If this can be a thing that really works and people see it, maybe it will help me get some interesting, smaller things financed and I can have a little more control over what comes after it,’ ” says Rudd. His only prior experience with anything of that scale and global reach was playing Phoebe’s boyfriend on Friends, but he was simply a recurring guest star then.
For the first time in Rudd’s life, he had to get into Marvel shape, which meant “cutting out anything enjoyable,” diet-wise, and a punishing exercise regimen. The results played into a popular narrative that Rudd seems to be aging in reverse. “I’m beginning to look like I could be his mum,” says Colman, who’s five years his junior. “It’s really fucking annoying, and he won’t share his secrets.” (Rudd insists he has none: “I’m a withering 80-year-old man on the inside,” he jokes, “and I’m catching up on the outside, too.”)
What Rudd hadn’t anticipated was the degree to which the next decade of his life would be spent either making or promoting a Marvel film. His first foray as Ant-Man led to two more stand-alone films and three Avengers movies, including the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday, where Feige says he plays “more of an elder statesman now, dealing with other newer characters.” Ant-Man even has his own theme park attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland. Rudd was there, alongside Feige, for its opening.
As he had hoped, he has been able to get other things made. Sure, there were more big studio franchise swings, including a pair of Ghostbuster films. (“Life is sometimes just collecting experiences,” he says.) But he’s also put his muscle behind smaller projects, including a few A24 films (Friendship, Death of a Unicorn), along with Mute, a Duncan Jones sci-fi drama that he did largely because he finally got to play a deeply menacing character. Some worked better than others, though Rudd is way too nice to start rattling off the ones that he regrets.
“I think Tina Fey said it best when she was like, sometimes you do something and you thought the script was great and it really works and then you’re watching it, and all of a sudden the credits come up, and you go, ‘Wow, that one shrunk in the wash,’ ” he says, and shrugs: “I’ve been in several things that have shrunk in the wash.”
Tom Ford shirt, belt, pants. Photographed by Beau Grealy ***
Our waiter has just come by to pour a fresh cup of black coffee, Rudd’s third in as many hours. He’ll pay for the caffeine blast later, but he’s between projects right now and has nowhere to be, which seems to genuinely thrill him. For someone who works as much as Rudd does, he’s quite content not working.
“The height of joy for me is having everyone I love under the same roof, maybe taking a walk around this amazing city, and then getting into bed at 8 or 9 at night and watching Antiques Roadshow with my wife,” he says, and he laughs: “I mean, my God, people don’t think I age? Listen to me.”
Now that his kids are grown — his daughter, Darby, is 16, his son, Jack, is 21 — he is planning to do another play, his first in more than a decade. Rudd had stopped when life got busy, and his kids, who were young at the time, took issue with their father’s absence. In fact, he can still conjure the heartbreaking look on his daughter’s face as she’d asked, “Daddy, do you really have to go back to the theater again tonight?” And now? “Oh, now she’d be like, ‘I don’t give a fuck, I’ve got homework,’ ” says Rudd.
But before a play or any other project, he’s got to get out the word for Power Ballad. He had a ball making the movie; it’s this part, the selling of it, that doesn’t come naturally, or even comfortably. It all feels so inauthentic, which makes him crazy. “I really just want to be a respected actor,” he says. “I want people to think that I’m good. I want to be in things that people think are cool. I want to be the kind of actor that were always my favorite actors growing up.”
So, I ask, does he feel that he’s achieved that?
“I don’t know,” he says, pausing again. “I don’t dwell on it.”
As he was making Power Ballad, Carney says it became clear: “Paul really doesn’t consider himself a big movie star — he considers himself a jobbing actor who just happens to have that face.” But, as the director notes, it was only once Rudd signed on to the project that other actors got interested, the money suddenly got released and the Irish Film Board came on board. He is, whether he can see it or not, the draw.
Still, Carney empathizes. “There’s a version of each of us out there that didn’t quite work out the way the weird, policing 20-year-old version of ourselves thought,” he says. “I mean, any time I get called a ‘crowd-pleasing film director,’ my 20-year-old self goes, ‘What happened? I thought you were going to be Jean-Luc Godard.’ “
Apatow caught an early screening of the movie, and in addition to being impressed by Rudd’s musical talent — yes, that’s really him singing and playing the guitar, which, per Jonas, “felt effortless and excellent from the first day on set” — he was thrilled by the dramatic opportunity that the role offered his pal. “When you watch it, you feel the entire history of frustration of this performer, and Paul’s great at carrying that pain,” says Apatow. “So, sure, he can do all the lighter colors, but, like so many great comedians, we sense that there’s more going on there, and the darker sides of his personality are what make him fascinating to watch.”
Despite glowing reviews, it’s impossible to predict whether anyone will go see Power Ballad in theaters, which is less a commentary on the film than it is the increasingly fragmented state of the entertainment industry. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that Rudd wants in the world right now. “I just want to feel fucking hopeful, and the thing I love about John Carney’s films is that you come away from them, like, ‘God, that was a really emotional ride and it moved me,’ ” he says. “But there’s also joy in it, and I’m seeking that out more now than ever before because of the crushing weight of everything else that is so overwhelmingly shitty.”
He looks up from his coffee cup. “I do want to be optimistic. I do want to laugh. I do want to not be serious about certain things,” he says, and then stops himself. He smiles. It’s almost as if Paul Rudd wants to be the guy that you think he is, too.
Givenchy shirt, pants, shoes; Everlane tee. Photographed by Beau Grealy This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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