Paul Rudd was born in 1969 in Passaic, NJ. Rudd has performed in numerous plays on and off Broadway and in London’s West End. In Rudd’s film career he has worked with directors including Baz Luhrmann, Adam McKay, Judd Apatow, and David Wain on projects like Romeo and Juliet, Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and The Ten.
Paul co-wrote the screenplay for the film Role Models with David Wain, Ken Marino, and Timothy Dowling. Rudd is one of the creators and writers of Starz’s television series, Party Down.
I try to ride anyone’s coattails who is really talented or really funny.
RUDD: I was born in Paseaic, NJ, although I never really lived there. We moved to Kansas City, then I moved to L.A., then to Kansas City, and then back to California. My dad worked for TWA Airlines. My parents are both British. I’m first generation. My mom did different things along the way. She cut hair in my grandfather’s salon since she was about twelve. For a while my parents started a hot tub business. That lasted for about seven years before that tanked, so to speak.
HYLTON: There’s a movie in that one.
RUDD: Yeah. Jews selling hot tubs. Actually, English Jews selling hot tubs. But, my parents are not actors and were never involved in the entertainment industry at all. I first started to realize that you could have a career talking, which is all I viewed it as, when I got into the Steve Martin comedy records. I was pretty young when I started listening to comedy albums. That was pretty mind-blowing to me. I became obsessed with stand up comedy. I never did perform comedy back then, but I loved it. In high school I used to do public speaking stuff and made these little features and stuff like that. But stand up was not my calling. At seventeen I was living in Kansas City and our next-door neighbor had a son who worked on Broadway. He said, “Why don’t you become an actor?” At the time I was working on animation and really into graphic art. I thought that was how I would go. But I remember vividly him saying to me “Why don’t you be an actor.” And I don’t know if this is just looking back and thinking it meant more then, but it opened up the option for me. And that’s the first time it really occurred to me that it was a possibility.
I decided I was going to go to Cal Arts, but somehow I ended up at the University of Kansas studying theater. Then I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and thought, “This is absolutely what I want to do.” I left in my junior year, 1990, to go to a theater school.
HYLTON: Am I correct that you met Neil Labute while at Kansas?
RUDD: I was there at the same time as [Neil] but I’m not sure if we actually met at that point. I think I did though because I did a production of MacBeth at University of Kansas. There were two Macbeths. There’s the good Macbeth and the bad Macbeth. It’s like you remember that guy in Annie Hall, the guy who is like “Touch my heart with your foot?”
HYLTON: Sure, I interviewed that guy. His name is John Glover. He was in an off Broadway play a few years ago.
RUDD: That’s amazing. He has a profound place in movie history.
HYLTON: Oh, I know. It’s one for my grandchildren to hear about.
RUDD: I wouldn’t know how to go about interviewing him.
HYLTON: He was very polite, and clean.
RUDD: That’s amazing. So, ironically, the director of Macbeth never wore shoes and he was friends with Neil LaBute. So Neil says we met through him. We did this production a few times. It wasn’t any extended run but we did a few performances. So when Neil and I realized he’d seen me in the production, I figured that Neil would fire me [from his play Bash]. But I did play the good Macbeth, and Neil let me stay in his production.
After Kansas I went to acting school in Pasadena. I felt it would be good to establish some connections in California. I stayed there for a few years after graduating, but I couldn’t wait to get to New York City at that time. I was at a school that was theater centric. I only took one camera class. And I knew I was just going to be happier in New York doing theater. It was going to be an up hill battle doing theater in L.A.
HYLTON: What roll did networking play in establishing yourself as an actor in L.A. and New York?
RUDD: You know I had a friend who connected me with an agent back then. I had never really pursued that kind of stuff while I was in school. The agent sent me on an audition and the people I read for sent me to a manager and it was a snowball thing. The first intro I made into that world then was really through a teacher I met at the American Academy of Arts in California. But it was an amount of time before I got here. There’s the whole tired conversation, “New York or L.A.” And I don’t know that there’s a right answer. I always felt much more comfortable on the east coast. Seventy degrees and sunny all the time is really annoying.
So I graduated from Pasadena and got into the Union by doing some commercials. I got my first acting job doing a play that I produced with one of my old teachers. It was about Byron and Shelley. It was a good play, but trying to get a production of a play about the lives of Byron and Shelley, produced in L.A., was pretty challenging. It was called Bloody Poetry and written by Howard Branton. And then I got a job on Sisters doing television. That was the first like, “Wow!”
I got a little exposure from that show. I mean there were four sisters and I. But I was still very much in the thought, “I want to do better, more important work.” So I got an offer to go to England to study Jacobean Drama. At the time my agent was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” It was what I wanted to do.
Now I think to myself, “What the fuck was I doing?” But when you’re twenty-four that’s the time to do that kind of stuff. It was a summer program. I missed a chunk of the season of Sisters. That’s when I learned the difference between being a recurring character and a regular. After that, I really was doing pretty well in L.A. My manager was the casting director on , Halloween VI. I was really skeptical, but I auditioned for it and got it. The casting director convinced me that this was going to be the one that was an art film. This was going to be completely different than the rest. So I did it. I was so upset after the fact. I thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing and this movie is terrible.” I took it way too seriously. Now, I think it would be fun. But that was the first movie I ever did.
While I was shooting it I auditioned for Clueless. And then I shot Clueless and right after I did that I moved to New York City. Clueless was one of the first times that I noticed a change. I started to get auditions I wouldn’t get before and with people other than just the casting director present. It was a change. I started to get better roll offers.
After Clueless came out Baz Lurhman was doing a production of Romeo and Juliet. And I was like, “I can do Shakespeare. Most guys my age can’t do it.” And so I wound up getting into that film. It was really exciting just having anything to do with that movie. And then I got a roll in Alfred Uhry’s play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, on Broadway. I couldn’t believe it. I did it for like a year. So basically, any kind of opportunities I had I from film, I pretty much nipped in the bud by doing plays. But it was an outstanding experience and a great play that won a Tony.
HYLTON: Did you get to know Alfred a bit through the process?
RUDD: Yeah, I spent holidays with him and his family at his house. He became my surrogate east coast family, Alfred and the girls. He is a wonderful guy. I did his play for a year. A year is a long time. But if you like the people and the part and all of that there is something so gratifying in the routine and challenge of it. So by the time I left the show I was definitely ready to leave the show, but I still loved it. I still like a long run on stage. It’s becoming harder and harder now to do that. And it’s very different from project to project how much time you have to rehearse before the play begins. With Broadway it’s more standard but I’ve been in plays where you had a week and a half before we premiered.
HYLTON: Have you had any experiences when you felt like you just went into autopilot during a production?
RUDD: Once you get out there and get into your routine you’re living in the moment. Maybe one time out of all of the plays I had a show when the curtain went down and I was like, “Wait a minute. Did we just do a show?” Maybe I was on autopilot. But I remember as a teenager when I’d see plays and say, “How do these people do a show eight times a week?” And then I’d see a show like three months later and say, “My god, since I’ve seen this show those people did that show how many times? That must be the most mundane thing to do.” But the reality is until you do it you don’t know how, not boring it can be. It almost never happens with film that you get any rehearsal time.
HYLTON: I’m interested in your experiences with work on the misunderstood film Anchorman.
RUDD: Well, many really good comedies frequently are misunderstood and not appreciated. Anchorman was all improvised and the script was written from that. Then when we were doing the film we used the script as a blueprint while we were shooting it. The first day I was sitting in a room with all of these guys who were Second City and Saturday Night Live alums. All of these guys were out of my league. I was in the major leagues and I was like, “Holy Shit.” It’s like watching Payton Manning in the groove or Barry Bonds. They were the best of the best. It was just really thrilling.
And with 40 Year Old Virgin it was the same thing. There is nothing more fulfilling than making up your own material and seeing it work. It’s hard now to make good films in Hollywood. There are always so many cooks in the kitchen that it’s become hard to do anything that has a point of view. Once you have so many people in a room making notes and giving suggestions, it’s going to kill the comedy.
HYLTON: Have you done any theater where there’s been that kind of collaborative environment?
RUDD: Mike Leigh does that. I would like to have that opportunity but I have never done a play like that. But when we were working on The Shape of Things with Neil LaBute there was some collaboration and reworking of lines. But not the same kind of thing I’ve been doing with films recently.
HYLTON: I think The Shape of Things is an interesting topic since it was a stage production and then shot in a way that stayed true to the play. Can you tell me a little bit about the way the play came about and how the film was borne?
RUDD: The play started in London at the Almeida [Theatre] and it was a really thrilling ride. It was a sold out show. There was such a feeling of electricity around that show. It was well received. I think they got the humor more than American audiences. But they also like plays that make fun of Americans. LaBute is such a talented writer. It was really an exciting production. And then we ended up doing it in New York. While we were in London, Rachel Weiss, had just finished shooting About A Boy and so she invited the people from that production company to see the play. And they saw it and really loved the play. And then when we did it in New York and it was just so strange to move it from London. In London we performed in an old bus terminal. It was a really cool space.
HYLTON: I saw the production in New York. I have to say it was a bizarre choice of theaters. As I recall it was on the Upper West in a space that felt like a big Broadway theater.
RUDD: I wanted to do the play in a performance space downtown. It was just the wrong theater and the wrong part of town. It should have been done in a more cutting edge way. It also was scheduled to open September 11th. It was an uphill battle. We did the play for over four months. The crowds started to come back. But during that time the details of the film were hammered out.
We were supposed to shoot it incrementally so that I could gain and lose weight. So I started eating and eating and was putting on weight. And by the end of the play Neil was like, “We’re going to have to shoot it all in one shot.” So then I had to lose all of that weight. I was eating lettuce for about a month. But it was a really neat experiment. When all was said and done The Shape of Things was a year of my life. It was a play and then a movie, but really just an interesting experience.
Neil made cuts for the film from the original script. The hardest part of the filming was to remember the differences in the parts from the stage to the film. You talked about being on autopilot. You can be on autopilot if you want to. Acting is made up of reactions to what someone else says. It never got there for me with Neil’s play. Despite the play being so dialog heavy, we were able to shoot it on film. The reason that was possible was because we could do entire scenes in one take. We essentially took an entire year to rehearse a movie by doing the preparatory work on stage. But it was just a really weird feeling jumping from one to another. It was still very much a play.
HYLTON: It seems there is a different level of respect for a playwright’s work than for a screenwriter’s product.
RUDD: There certainly is. I think to write a play, especially a play being done by a theater group or a Broadway play, you have to be pretty good. With plays the audience has to work more than with going to a movie. There is something denser with plays than with a film script. In the theater world when you go to see a play it is usually about the writer and how good the play is. The writer is the centerpiece. In the movie world the writer is lucky if he gets to visit the set. He’s the last person to get any credit. Most people have no idea who wrote a movie.
HYLTON: Can you tell me a little bit about The Object of My Affection, a movie you did several years ago written by a prominent playwright Wendy Wasserstein?
RUDD: Wendy was there during the shooting. She was very close with the director of the film. They were very friendly during the film. Nick Hytner, the director, had a connection with her. That was also a really wonderful experience for me. It was around the time of The Last Night of Ballyhoo. I did that for a year, but in the middle of the play, I took a hiatus to do the film. I met Nick when I was acting in London in a play called The Madness of George III, with Nigel Hawthorne. They changed the name to The Madness of King George when they made it into a film in the States because the producers were afraid that people wouldn’t go and see it because they would think it was a sequel and no one would go because they missed parts one and two. I did about six months of Ballyhoo and I agreed to come back after I shot the movie.
And to work with Nick again was fantastic. I also knew Jennifer Aniston from way before she did Friends and everything. We were friends and it was just so bizarre because we were like, “We’re starring in a movie together.” There was something really exciting about it. And plus she is the sweetest girl. It was a really fun set to work on. We had a rather funny thing one day when we were shooting. Allison Janney was in the film and she had the day off. But she came in anyway and had the makeup people dress her as an old man. So there was this scene when I got up and left the room. But instead I stopped and I looked at this strange old man with a goatee. And then the two of us just started making out. Virtually no one knew that old man was Allison, with exception of the Director of Photography who filmed the Director’s reaction. So Nick just thought I’d lost it. And it was just fascinating seeing someone transform from being so shocked to, when he realized it was Allison, recognizing what was going on. Nick just lost it and couldn’t stop. We had to stop shooting for about fifteen minutes. It was really zero to sixty in no seconds. He didn’t even start to laugh. He just started crying. Straight to crying. There were a lot of jokes going on around it. That film was just a great experience.
I’m so happy I got to know Oliver Stapleton, who was the Director of Photography on Object of My Affection, and did Cider House Rules. I asked Oliver one day, “How do you stay so even keeled?” He just said to me, “Well, I figured out several years ago that if you go to see a movie, generally it lasts about two hours. And if you really don’t like it you can just walk out. But if you’re working on a movie, it takes about four months. And if you don’t like it, too bad. You have to finish the job. So I just made a decision at that point that if I’m working on it I’m going to enjoy it and work on projects I think I’ll enjoy.”
They are just movies. I mean I guess there are some important movies. I mean, none that I’ve ever worked on… but I guess they’re out there. For me and for other actors I imagine, these are incredible life experiences. For instance, I was in Mexico City for four months because I worked on Romeo and Juliet. That film gave me that experience.
HYLTON: Any rules of thumb you’d like to pass on to young actors reading this?
RUDD: I try to ride anyone’s coattails who is really talented or really funny. I try to grab onto their projects and hold on tight.
