By "AND THEY ALL COME WITH A SIDE OF FLEET FOXES."
That was Paul Rudd’s first joke, and it came about 30 seconds into our lunch at a Brooklyn café, right after I acknowledged that the sheer number of toasts available on the menu—from avocado to burrata to fig—made this the most “Brooklyn” café he could have possibly chosen for this interview.
Avocado toast with a side of Fleet Foxes. It’s a 2017 joke, but, still, it’s funny.
He would deliver like two other jokes over the next couple hours. Okay, maybe three. Ten max.
Rudd may be singularly hilarious in I Love You, Man; Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; This Is 40; and even Marvel’s Ant-Man, or in a million absurdist Conan appearances, and don’t get me wrong, the next two hours would involve laughter, good cheer, and so much grinning my cheeks hurt, but he’s not comedic in person. Not zany. Not even remotely off-the-wall. Wearing a beanie, glasses, and maybe a day and a half’s worth of stubble, he squinted at me for about five seconds outside the restaurant before I realized it was him. He politely asked if it was okay if we grabbed a table in the restaurant instead of in the coffee-shop area. And when we got to the table, I asked him if he’d rather sit facing the wall because, you know, he’s Ant-Man and people might sneak a few iPhone shots, and he said, “Well, I do usually. . . .” The overarching vibe is chill, gentle, low-key, generous.
And thank God. You can watch Paul Rudd chewing up scenery in his movies or during any of his five SNL hosting gigs, or just clear your schedule for an hour and YouTube “Paul Rudd.” He is genuinely very, very funny in literally every single thing he’s been in. But as with so many funny people, it’s complicated. Fueling that humor is a hopeful weariness we can all relate to—especially now. His funniest roles are marked by equal parts indignation and empathy. It’s as if Rudd has played a confused middle-aged dad his entire career, even as Josh in Clueless, when he was 26. Now that he’s actually a middle-aged dad, well, his portrayal of a fool suffering fools is highly compelling. Paul Rudd’s gift is something more interesting than being funny. And, to me, more powerful.
PAUL RUDD DOES NOT come from a lightweight people.
“This is my grandfather David,” Rudd says while moving his iPhone across the table and showing me a sepia-tone image of three frowning chaps with their arms crossed. David Rudd is in the tightest ribbed turtleneck ever donned, and the other two—Rudd’s great-uncles Jack and Morrie—are shirtless. They’d be considered jacked if they were around today. Correcting for inflation, they’re swole. “My grandfather would tour all over London as ‘The Strongest Man in England.’ ”
Pardon?
“He and my uncles would travel around and wrestle.”
After making plans to write a whole other story about the Fighting Rudds of England, I ask him if his dad was fit like his grandfather. Not really. But his grandfather—who would change the family name from Rudnitsky to Rudd during a time of anti-Semitism in England—passed down a genetic predisposition to hard work and earnest effort. His dad—an airline exec—was funny, but the target of his humor was foolishness and idiocy. “He was pretty cutting. Anything that George Carlin said sounded to me like my dad. He was pretty clear thinking, no bullshit. He could get very frustrated by idiots, and he would never let things roll off his back. He could get pretty animated talking about something that annoyed him, which was a lot of stuff.”
His British-born parents settled in New Jersey, where Rudd was born. He was ten when the family moved to a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, and he’s still a devoted Chiefs fan, even though he and his wife, Julie, and their two children split their time between Manhattan and upstate New York. He attended the University of Kansas, and later the British American Drama Academy at Oxford to study Jacobean drama, which is marked by revenge, turmoil, violence. Intense emoting is not optional.
From his earliest roles, Rudd was highly believable when playing frustrated characters, manipulating the anger that resulted from that frustration—and the relief that resulted from overcoming it—for comedic effect.
His acting in the 2008 movie Role Models, costarring Seann William Scott, was partly an homage to his dad. “There’s a scene where I order a large black coffee and they say, ‘You mean venti?’ Just the naming of the coffee cups and the pretentious nonsense behind so many obvious things. . . . It’s a personal thing. And I remember putting this in and going, This is for my dad, because he will totally appreciate this. I thought, I can’t wait for my dad to see this. I’ve always just ordered black coffee, like my dad.”
It was also an homage to two movie scenes that helped Rudd see that anger isn’t as funny as incredulousness. The first is in 1986’s The Money Pit. “When the bathtub falls through the floor and Tom Hanks just starts maniacally laughing. God, who’s better than Tom Hanks?”
The other is in the underrated 1985 movie After Hours. Rudd says it made him want to study acting. “Griffin Dunne has been through so much. And he finally finds a safe harbor in some guy’s loft because there’s a mob out in the streets looking for him. And he calls the cops, and they say, Go get some sleep. And they hang up on him. But he doesn’t get mad. He’s just stupefied. And he says, ‘Oh, wow. Oh, wow.’ The only emotion is surprise. It’s beyond frustration. And it’s sublime.”
One of Rudd’s least-watched movies is Overnight Delivery from 1998, which is a shame, because it’s 87 minutes of nonstop Ruddian vexation. Rudd told me no one has ever brought it up with him in an interview, or quite possibly at any other time in the past 30 years, but I think it’s a key movie for him. He’s frustrated at every turn, and at the end, once he and Reese Witherspoon finally outsmart the universe and outrun a package he mistakenly sent to his long-distance girlfriend, there’s a scene in which he dances on top of a truck that I consider to be one of the greatest moments in movie history. The first time I saw it, I replayed it around 20 times. It’s mesmerizing. He does like ten different moves and says to Witherspoon, “I know I’m being stupid, but we have been through scrape after scrape!”
He specializes in scrapes. He’s a frustrated hero. It’s not a type that Rudd set out to play, but he did set out to do movies. He had a plan. He was 16 when he decided he wanted to be an actor. And he thought of it as a job, not a passion. “I never wavered from it. And I never had a backup. I said, I’m gonna go to school and study this.” He made some questionable moves for someone who aspired to be a working actor. After wrapping up his work on Clueless, his first big-studio movie, he signed up to do a play in New York for a year.
“My agent said, What are you doing? My career was just starting. But I had a real clear vision then of what I wanted and how I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to be considered a joke among actors who I really admire. I really wanted to learn how to do this right. I had a real focus. Certainly some of the movies were not as good as I’d imagined, but they were beneficial, each in their own way.” After a string of romantic comedies, he did Wet Hot American Summer. “Without that, I don’t know if I get to do Anchorman, which was seminal. And I’ve gotten to work with Judd Apatow for years now.”
Landing Ant-Man wasn’t part of his plan. But it changed him—not just his career, but him—forever. “My agent set up a meeting with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. Marvel was pretty new. They weren’t even part of Disney. It would’ve been like somebody saying, How would you feel about doing Dancing with the Stars? A superhero franchise was never on my radar. I never really thought I was the type of actor that they would offer any of those parts to. But when this idea came around, I was excited about doing something that was so out of left field, and I knew that if it was announced that I was going to be joining a superhero franchise, most people would say, What the fuck?
“And I got to wear a superhero suit.”
He also had to look good in the scenes in which he took that superhero suit off. “Every shirtless scene I had ever done was for comedy’s sake. I had no business doing a shirtless scene [in a superhero movie].”
Rudd’s Ant-Man prep is not all that notable—trainers were hired, weights were lifted, sugar was omitted, pounds were shed, abs were uncovered. Rudd isn’t even the biggest superhero-movie transformation story. That award goes to Kumail Nanjiani, who played Kingo in Eternals, also part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But I find the way he reflects on his year-long effort of getting ready to shoot the first Ant-Man movie and the respective efforts he underwent to prep for subsequent Marvel films—Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Endgame—to be unusually instructive. He seems to want to help anyone who understands the basics of fitness but sometimes finds it hard to stick with a plan, like him. (And like me.)
The most important tip? Paul Rudd’s secret to a superhero body? To eternal youth? To happiness?
He holds out his hand at eye level. “Sleep.”
He progressively lowers it as he goes through the rest. “Then diet. Then weights. Then cardio. People ask me, ‘Can you send me your meal plan? How many times a week do you work out? Do you drink? Do you eat carbs? Do you have a cheat day?’ The most important part of training is sleep. People will set their alarm and then sleep for four hours and they’ll get up so that they can train. They’re doing themselves a disservice. If you can somehow get eight hours of sleep . . .”
It’s an investment in tomorrow, the perpetual sequel.
Here’s what tomorrow will look like for Rudd: “I get up and I have a cup of coffee, and then I do cardio before I eat anything. I never would’ve done that before [Ant-Man]. I lift weights, hopefully at least three times a week. And I’ve learned so much about how my body reacts to foods, how it reacts to exercise, and where I’m happiest and how much it affects me mentally. . . . If I’m in this suit, running around playing a character who’s supposed to be a superhero, I just feel better. And I feel less like an impostor.”
He eats eggs every day. A lot of salmon. Protein shakes that are just protein and water, no fruit.
“It sounds like hell. It’s really not. I find routine comforting.”
And he finds falling off that routine discomforting. Regimen has become essential for Rudd in the same way it’s become essential for so many of us who now do a lot of our work from home.
“There isn’t an office that we have to go to every day where we see the same people and do the same kind of job. Routine is a human need. It’s grounding in a really positive and healthy way.”
This past year was tough. There were two events that caused him to take stock of how much he’d fallen off his routine.
One was shooting Quantumania right after The Shrink Next Door, an eight-episode Apple TV+ miniseries that showed Rudd aging about 30 years. I loved watching Rudd and Will Ferrell play their characters mostly without any of the tricks they use for funnier roles, and it’s worth it just to see how Rudd’s genetics seem to defy even the efforts of professional makeup and special-effects artists. As a 70-something old man, he still looks young. And soft.
“I worked really hard to get back into shape for Quantumania, and I realized, Oh my God, this is so much harder than it was [for the last Ant-Man project]. I had fallen off more than I had in the past. All of a sudden my clothes fit tight. And I thought, God, this sucks. I can’t even wear these pants. So I’d say to myself, Well, I might as well just eat some of these cookies. I was irritable and self-conscious. I just wasn’t in a good mood. I really beat myself up.”
I’m suddenly sitting across from Rudd’s character, Pete, from This Is 40, a grown man who can’t stop secretively eating cupcakes. Rudd’s way out of this rut was knowing he had a deadline.
“I can be a hyper-focused person if I have a goal. If I’m doing one of these movies and I know that in four months I have to do a shirtless scene, I’m pretty dialed in. I also try and find the happy medium. I could work out hard and eat perfectly and I’ll still look worse than most of the other Avengers.”
The other event: being on the cover of this magazine.
“My first reaction to being in Men’s Health was: I can’t. There’s no way. But [my rep] said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re doing the magazine.’ So I thought, It’s gonna motivate me. It’s gonna force me into it. And it did. But the fitness that I do now has less to do with the fact that I might have to do another Marvel movie or a magazine shoot and more because I finally understand if you make fitness a part of your lifestyle, you’ll just feel good.”
And look good—maybe even a lot younger than you actually are.
Do you see what others see, what I’m seeing right now, that you don’t seem to have aged as quickly as other men in their 50s? I ask him.
“I see some things that people are politely not acknowledging. I’m certainly happy that people don’t say the opposite. Like, God, he looks a hundred years old! It’s flattering, but at the same time, I never know what the response is supposed to be.”
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t know how to respond, either. Because who knows what’s responsible for it? It’s almost certainly an alchemy of genetics and all the resources available to a rich actor who needs to look his best in order to land more roles that make him richer and richer. And gallons of moisturizer.
As I sit across from Rudd, he looks young, sure. Maybe 42? And if a sunbeam christens his chiseled jaw in the right way, a little like a superhero. But the overwhelming impression is something more nuanced—and more earned—than that. He looks like an expert.
When you reach a certain age and you have been able to, by the grace of God or genetics or Western medicine, maintain a healthy body and a sharp mind, you acquire the contented look of a person who has hacked a complicated system—your system. It’s not like you don’t care what other people think about you; it’s that you care what you think about you so much more. You’ve been forced to spend so much time working on simply existing in the world in a way that isn’t uncomfortable that even a pleasant lunch at which you order something delicious but healthy can feel like both win and reward. Rudd doesn’t represent youth so much as he represents knowing how much energy to expend on any one endeavor to achieve an appropriate level of fulfillment. That’s hard work!
The older you get, the more, dare I say, heroic that effort needs to be, and the better about yourself you feel when you know you’re pulling it off. A lot of it isn’t fun—protein shakes with no fruit? It takes earnest effort that requires being alone in your thoughts and being sincerely committed—whether you’re portraying superhuman ability onscreen or playing pickup basketball past 30.
Spending a couple hours with Paul Rudd is inspiring. I don’t like how fawning that sounds, but it’s true.
Our conversation helped me change some things I knew needed changing. After I stopped drinking a couple years ago, I developed an addiction to caffeine that meant drinking coffee purely for the high—and at all hours. I haven’t had coffee after 11:00 a.m. since my interview with Rudd, and I’ve been sleeping (and vividly dreaming!) better than I have in months. And I restarted a 30-minute bodyweight routine that got sidelined when I began a new job.
Thanks, Ant-Man! (I love an introspective superhero.)
Rudd is an everyday hero, as my editor calls him, not because he’s one of the funniest living actors and not because he’s a Marvel star. Paul Rudd is an everyday hero because undergirding all that humor and heroism is hope.
Look, Paul Rudd is an actor. Actors don’t get enough credit for being actors. Their entire job is to fake sincerity. But there are some actors who respond so authentically to obstacles—they take a beat before responding or they move their eyebrows just a little or they open their eyes wide or they dance on top of a truck in a way that just makes sense—that you really believe they themselves know what it takes to change your circumstances. Rudd’s greatest gift (Tom Hanks has this, too; and Steve Carell) isn’t comedy but rather how he subtly employs comedy to show how complicated—and funny!—coping is. Rudd’s career is one big coping fest. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of getting by.
And there’s no coping (imagine Rudd saying this to one of his kids in an Apatow movie as they roll their eyes) without hoping.
If you look at his movies through that prism, you see the serious matter of hope everywhere. And when you talk to Paul Rudd about Paul Rudd, you see that although he is as good at playing the frustrated bumbler as anyone in cinematic history, he himself is no bumbler. He does not come from a bumbling people.
He’s a serious man. Even if life sometimes makes him the butt of the joke.
Speaking of, here’s Paul Rudd’s second key joke during our conversation: “The shirtless scene was cut from Ant-Man.”
It’s true. The clearest view the audience gets of the torso that Rudd spent months carving was little more than a blink-and-you-miss-it side view. Nice lats and obliques, but still.
“On one hand, I was annoyed because I put in a year’s worth of hard work. On the other, if I had to look at myself shirtless in a Marvel movie, I would just want to make fun of it in every single way. Ultimately the movie was running long, and the scene wasn’t essential.”
Depends how you look at it. All that effort may not have made it into the movie, but in no universe was it a waste of time.
This story appears in the March 2023 issue of Men's Health.
Ross McCammon is former special projects editor at Men’s Health and author of Works Well With Others.
