Paul Rudd

Paul Rudd is not ageless. He just ages on a different scale than the rest of us mortals. He’s in his late fifties now and looks about the same as Werner Herzog did in his early thirties. Clearly, now is the time for a movie about the making of Aguirre, Wrath of God. There’s a lot of drama there, or you could go the route of making it enormously funny without the characters’ knowing it’s a comedy. I would watch the hell out of that movie and buy it on physical media as soon as they let me do so. You could probably even get Werner to cameo somewhere.

Rudd was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and grew up everywhere. His father worked for TWA—remember TWA?—and the family moved a lot. His bar mitzvah was in Ontario, Canada. He lived in Anaheim for three years. Eventually, he ended up in Kansas, where he actually seems to have stayed for a while, completing both junior high and high school there. Even college. Though he also studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the British American Drama Academy, in Oxford. He worked as a bar mitzvah DJ and had a job for a while glazing hams.

Yes, I remember seeing his commercial for the Super Nintendo when I was a kid. I might also have seen him on Sisters, a show I liked that was aimed at viewership way older than I was, though I don’t remember for sure. (That show had a really stacked cast.) But where I first really remember him as an actor, like a good Gen-X woman, is the movie for which he took a brief leave from the show, Cher’s ex-stepbrother Josh. Honestly, Josh formed a lot of what I wanted from a partner, being smart and funny and compassionate and not afraid to call Cher out when she needed it.

From there, he was a pretty decent “Dave Paris” in Romeo + Juliet, a movie I will defend. He still did some turkeys, but mostly he seemed to be settling into—with all the love in my heart—a Generic White Boy Actor career. He’s got 145 credits on IMDb, and that can often come from the studios’ trying to make someone happen. However, what saved him from that was that he turned out to have a sly sense of humour that was impossible to resist. It was probably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy that let his career take a hard veer away from that path.

As someone who still watches and (mostly) enjoys the MCU, I think Paul Rudd was an excellent choice for Scott Lang. (Quantumania wasn’t.) You can complain a lot about the quippiness of the MCU, and my Gods there are places where even I agree. But one of the things that works best in the franchise is Paul Rudd. I’m not even sure he’s acting for a lot of it, not unlike Robert Downey Jr. They’re just playing exaggerated versions of themselves with access to superhero technology. It’s nice work, if you can get it.