This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/09/paul-rudd-ant-man-hollywoods-nice-guy-english-parents-kansas
The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Previous version
1
Next version
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Paul Rudd on Ant-Man, being Hollywood’s go-to nice guy and growing up with English parents in Kansas | Paul Rudd on Ant-Man, being Hollywood’s go-to nice guy and growing up with English parents in Kansas |
| (8 days later) | |
| It is almost two decades to the day since Paul Rudd first came to public attention and two things about him have remained unchanged since. The first, most obviously, is his face. Save for some faint lines on his forehead, Rudd looks unnervingly similar to how he did in Clueless, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next week and in which he played the love interest Josh. So much so that his lifelong friend Jon Hamm has suggested this is down to “all that crazy virgin blood he’s drinking”. | |
| The second is his personality: Paul Rudd is just so darn nice. Every interview he has done mentions this and every one of his co-stars says this about him (Amy Poehler recently described him to me in an interview as “Mr Perfect”). Last year, the American comedian Stephen Colbert dropped his carefully honed rightwing blowhard persona on The Colbert Report to talk seriously about how Rudd is “the nicest person on the planet”, describing the time Rudd sang Oops! ... I Did It Again on loop with Colbert’s six-year-old daughter to keep her entertained. | |
| “Ah, you know, he was biased. It was just that I was playing with his kids,” Rudd shrugs when I bring this up, as though he is offering proof that he is cheating his way to likability as opposed to further evidence of his niceness. | |
| Hollywood and audiences also tend to think of him as the ultimate nice guy – the go-to man for the safe boyfriend role. But many of Rudd’s best-known roles have involved him playing embittered cynics, such as in the underrated Role Models, which he co-wrote, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which he played an unhinged ex-boyfriend, and Knocked Up ,as the frustrated husband Pete (“Isn’t it weird when you have a kid and all your dreams and hopes go right out the window?”). Then there are the characters Rudd describes as “the full-on buffoons”, such as reporter Brian Fantana in Anchorman, who gives names to his testicles and – still my favourite Rudd performance – Andy the obnoxious summer camp counsellor in cult 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer, which is being revived on Netflix this summer, in which Rudd will co-star alongside original cast members including Poehler and Bradley Cooper. Yet such is Rudd’s shining niceness that his public image as Mr Good Guy, the perfect fantasy boyfriend, has remained unaffected by the roles he plays. | |
| By the time I meet up with Rudd, he has been stuck inside an airless London hotel room doing interviews for his performance as the eponymous Ant-Man, the latest superhero film in Marvel’s hugely lucrative stable, for more than eight hours, starting at 7am. Yet in his trim suit and dark shirt he couldn’t look less ruffled and more psyched to see me, urging me to partake in refreshments (“No tea? You sure? But you must be so hot!”) and latching immediately on to my transatlantic accent. I’m not surprised that Rudd seizes on my accent – his parents were British Jews from Edgware and Surbiton, and while Rudd was born in New Jersey in 1969 and raised in the US, he was often in Britain as a kid to visit relatives in London’s less glamorous suburbs and Basingstoke. | |
| Related: Ant-Man review: diminishing returns for latest expansion of Marvel universe | Related: Ant-Man review: diminishing returns for latest expansion of Marvel universe |
| “I’ve always felt genuinely at home here, just from the little things. As a kid, I was elated I could get all the chocolates I never could get back in the States. The world is small when you’re small, so that was HUGE,” he says, his eyes growing wide at the memory of all those Wonka-esque sweets, such as Rowntree Fruit Gums for his dad (“Never the pastilles!”), and Smarties and Crunchie bars for his younger sister and him. | “I’ve always felt genuinely at home here, just from the little things. As a kid, I was elated I could get all the chocolates I never could get back in the States. The world is small when you’re small, so that was HUGE,” he says, his eyes growing wide at the memory of all those Wonka-esque sweets, such as Rowntree Fruit Gums for his dad (“Never the pastilles!”), and Smarties and Crunchie bars for his younger sister and him. |
| “I’m now getting asked about the comics I read as a kid [because of Ant-Man], but the comics I loved were the Beano and Dandy: Desperate Dan, the Bash Street Kids, Dennis the Menace. You say ‘Dennis the Menace’ in America and it’s a totally different thing,” he says with solemn emphasis. | |
| Then there were the cultural legacies of growing up with English parents: “Tea! Tea has always been a big thing in my life. And I’m not talking about Liptons with lemon or iced tea, or any of that nonsense. Has to be hot PG Tips with milk. So growing up [in the States], it was a constant struggle …” he deadpans. | |
| Part of Rudd’s reputation for niceness comes from his eagerness to self-deprecate – not a common trait among Hollywood celebrities – and I had lazily assumed this, too, was an inheritance from his English background. Even in the bromantic comedies with which he has become synonymous, it always feels like Rudd’s character is knowingly self-mocking rather than engaging in the more bullying comedy style of his frequent co-star Seth Rogen. But Rudd puts his self-deprecation down to something more complicated than nationality. His father worked for the airline TWA and the family moved a lot, before settling in Kansas when he was 10. | Part of Rudd’s reputation for niceness comes from his eagerness to self-deprecate – not a common trait among Hollywood celebrities – and I had lazily assumed this, too, was an inheritance from his English background. Even in the bromantic comedies with which he has become synonymous, it always feels like Rudd’s character is knowingly self-mocking rather than engaging in the more bullying comedy style of his frequent co-star Seth Rogen. But Rudd puts his self-deprecation down to something more complicated than nationality. His father worked for the airline TWA and the family moved a lot, before settling in Kansas when he was 10. |
| “I was always in new schools and had British parents, which was not the norm, and I think there was also … I’m not particularly religious, but I was born Jewish and I always felt like the outsider because I wasn’t Christian or Catholic,” he says. “So I learned early on that I could be accepted if I made people laugh when I turned the joke on myself and, particularly in Kansas, if I made a joke about being Jewish, my friends would laugh really hard, harder than they perhaps should have.” | |
| Yet he talks about his childhood, Kansas and, in particular, his family with enormous fondness, especially his father, who died six years ago and whom he idolised and references often in our time together. One of the defining memories of his younger years is watching his father crack up on the sofa while watching Monty Python, which planted the seed of him wanting to be a comedian and eventually an actor. | |
| Related: Paul Rudd: Hollywood's most lovable man | Related: Paul Rudd: Hollywood's most lovable man |
| “Actors talk about a love of craft and contributing to artistic welfare. But, really, I think [the desire to act] came for me from wanting more attention from my parents,” he says. I’d always assumed that the dorky dancing that he breaks out in nearly all his films was a homage to Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But Rudd assures me, “There is family footage of me doing that same dance at the age of four, just to make my parents laugh.” | “Actors talk about a love of craft and contributing to artistic welfare. But, really, I think [the desire to act] came for me from wanting more attention from my parents,” he says. I’d always assumed that the dorky dancing that he breaks out in nearly all his films was a homage to Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But Rudd assures me, “There is family footage of me doing that same dance at the age of four, just to make my parents laugh.” |
| Is his friendliness part of that desire to please or does that come from growing up in the midwest? “There is something about growing up in the midwest that gives a different kind of sensibility,” he agrees. “But if I’m feeling insecure, the smiles and politeness get upped a notch, and maybe that isn’t totally reflective of how I’m feeling on the inside. But, you know, better to be thought of as a nice person than a dickhead.” He laughs and carefully – and correctly – pours himself a cup of tea. | Is his friendliness part of that desire to please or does that come from growing up in the midwest? “There is something about growing up in the midwest that gives a different kind of sensibility,” he agrees. “But if I’m feeling insecure, the smiles and politeness get upped a notch, and maybe that isn’t totally reflective of how I’m feeling on the inside. But, you know, better to be thought of as a nice person than a dickhead.” He laughs and carefully – and correctly – pours himself a cup of tea. |
| While there might be some truth to that, the man is too sweet for it to be just a twitch of insecurity. He doesn’t even wince when he is asked – for what must be the 10 billionth time in his life – about Clueless. | While there might be some truth to that, the man is too sweet for it to be just a twitch of insecurity. He doesn’t even wince when he is asked – for what must be the 10 billionth time in his life – about Clueless. |
| “Honestly, I’m just happy to be involved with something that struck a chord with as many people as it did. I remember after we’d done the first table read and the whole cast went out to get something to eat and someone said: ‘How cool would it be if this movie is to kids now what those John Hughes movies had been to us?’ So that it turned out to be that way was just a fluke. Even the day it came out, the producer, Scott Rudin, called me and said: ‘Congratulations, we’ve got good reviews – don’t get used to this.’ Smart man,” he says. | |
| Rudd could easily have been another cute guy in a 90s film whose career faded out of view in the next decade – another Freddie Prinze Jr, say, or, at best, a Josh Charles. That he isn’t is largely thanks to two career developments in the next decade: Friends and Judd Apatow. When Rudd was cast in Friends in 2002, he had been working steadily since the 90s, including making a small but amusing appearance in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, but not in anything nearly as seminal as Clueless. But Rudd is largely dismissive of his experience on Friends: “The process [of making a sitcom] seemed really foreign to me, so it’s kind of a strange memory for me. I mainly hung out in the background and talked to Gunther. It was amazing but kind of like being the Jew with English parents in Kansas – that’s the way I felt on Friends. I just didn’t want to get in the way. So as far as having an impact on my career, it was really with Anchorman and then The 40 Year Old Virgin where I took a left turn.” | |
| These films certainly rejuvenated Rudd’s career, and presumably gave him the leverage to create the brilliant but too shortlived sitcom Party Down. But increasingly they started to look like they were trapping him. For every decent comedy in which he has appeared in the past decade, there have been plenty of meh ones (This is Forty, Our Idiot Brother) and too many terrible ones (Admission, Dinner for Schmucks, How Do You Know). | These films certainly rejuvenated Rudd’s career, and presumably gave him the leverage to create the brilliant but too shortlived sitcom Party Down. But increasingly they started to look like they were trapping him. For every decent comedy in which he has appeared in the past decade, there have been plenty of meh ones (This is Forty, Our Idiot Brother) and too many terrible ones (Admission, Dinner for Schmucks, How Do You Know). |
| “Over the last 10 years, I never made a very concerted effort to mix it up. I just wanted to work on things that I liked. But I think I was feeling some fatigue over that and wanted to try something different,” he says. | |
| Which brings us to Ant-Man. While superhero movies are now part of Hollywood’s landscape, you would go through a lot of names before getting to Rudd’s when thinking of actors you would expect to add to the superhero roster. As Rudd says himself: “I knew being in this would make people say: ‘What? Really?’” But this is partly why he works in the film – after all, a movie about a man whose special power is that he becomes ant-sized is not calling for a classic macho man (although Rudd did buff up a little for the film, a process he describes, with sweet nerdiness, as “enjoyable – it was fun to have that kind of focus”). | Which brings us to Ant-Man. While superhero movies are now part of Hollywood’s landscape, you would go through a lot of names before getting to Rudd’s when thinking of actors you would expect to add to the superhero roster. As Rudd says himself: “I knew being in this would make people say: ‘What? Really?’” But this is partly why he works in the film – after all, a movie about a man whose special power is that he becomes ant-sized is not calling for a classic macho man (although Rudd did buff up a little for the film, a process he describes, with sweet nerdiness, as “enjoyable – it was fun to have that kind of focus”). |
| Rudd plays Scott, a (semi) reformed thief who is hired by science genius Dr Pym (a strangely bland Michael Douglas) to stop the evil Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from using the shrinking technology for evil. It’s a visually sparky film, a mercifully far cry from the solemn ponderousness of too many superhero films today. But it’s hard not to wonder if much of the spark came from the film’s original director, Edgar Wright, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Cornish, before both were replaced at the eleventh hour by Peyton Reed as director and Rudd and Anchorman’s Adam McKay as scriptwriters. (Reed has said the idea for the film’s best scene, set in a child’s bedroom, came from Wright). Rudd eagerly credits Wright and Cornish with “doing most of the heavy lifting” on the script, but adds that he and McKay “did a pretty substantial re-write, although we wanted to stay true to what those guys had written, but also open it up.” | |
| Does he know why Wright was let go? “I don’t, er – that’s really between Edgar and Marvel. Yeah,” he says, with a slightly nervous look towards the PR in the room. | |
| Whatever the truth of the story behind the film, Rudd will appear as Ant-Man in Captain America: Civil War and may well join the Avengers stable. After nailing teen romances in the 90s and fratty comedies in the earlier 2000s, the third and equally zeitgeisty part to Rudd’s career may well be beginning in superheroes. But for him, he says, the best part is that his son, who is 10, can enjoy his work for the first time (Rudd also has a young daughter and he and his family live in New York City). | Whatever the truth of the story behind the film, Rudd will appear as Ant-Man in Captain America: Civil War and may well join the Avengers stable. After nailing teen romances in the 90s and fratty comedies in the earlier 2000s, the third and equally zeitgeisty part to Rudd’s career may well be beginning in superheroes. But for him, he says, the best part is that his son, who is 10, can enjoy his work for the first time (Rudd also has a young daughter and he and his family live in New York City). |
| “This is the first film of mine that he’s seen and it makes me proud and nervous at the same time. I took him to the premiere – he’d never been to a premiere, and that was a very moving experience for me. The best thing about anything is sharing it with your kid.” | “This is the first film of mine that he’s seen and it makes me proud and nervous at the same time. I took him to the premiere – he’d never been to a premiere, and that was a very moving experience for me. The best thing about anything is sharing it with your kid.” |
| Your son must think you’re pretty cool to be a superhero, I say. “Well, if I could now get a job playing with the Kansas City Chiefs or Man City, then I’d be really cool to him,” he says with a self-mocking, dorky-dad grin. Because, as he knows himself, Paul Rudd is too nice to be cool. | Your son must think you’re pretty cool to be a superhero, I say. “Well, if I could now get a job playing with the Kansas City Chiefs or Man City, then I’d be really cool to him,” he says with a self-mocking, dorky-dad grin. Because, as he knows himself, Paul Rudd is too nice to be cool. |
| Ant-Man goes on worldwide release on 17 July. |
Previous version
1
Next version