The Big Little Secrets to Paul Rudd’s Massive Appeal

Rudd’s appeal is so obvious and everymannish that it’s easy to ignore his striking facility with  language. His diction is impeccable, his syllables laser-cut. “I’m classically trained, my friend,” he said, mock-haughty. “Sorry if my plosives are too hard and they’re getting all over you.” There is, undergirding his unending willingness to riff, a rigor not often seen in comedic actors.

He arrived in Hollywood in his mid-twenties, after graduating from the University of Kansas and winning a spot at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He more or less burned with youthful intensity. When submitting the audition monologues that got him into the program, Rudd read a portion of what he called blue-collar poetry. “It was,” he remembered, “about a guy that worked in a fast food restaurant, who was talking about the pressure of somebody coming in and ordering 30 burgers, or something like that. I was like, This is real and powerful and beautiful. And if people don’t see the beauty in this, they don’t get it. That was what I was like.” Which is to say: he was single-minded in the way that young actors can be. He mounted a blown-up copy of the Los Angeles Times review of the Daniel Day-Lewis film My Left Foot to his bedroom wall.

He couldn’t shake his suspicion, though, that there might be another way to do it. “I used to think, when I was lying down on my back, closing my eyes in class, and having the teachers say, ‘Now pretend you’re a lizard, but you also have to be a purple lizard. What does that look like?’ that if my friends from school walked in right now, they would just mock me endlessly. And I would want them to!”

He spent the first chunk of his career indulging his artsier inclinations, abandoning a recurring guest role on a TV series to study Jacobean drama at Oxford, and then moving from Los Angeles to New York just after filming Clueless, which promptly became a smash. “I was really focused on artistry. And, believe it or not, this might shock people, I still am,” he said. “But I thought, I really care about what it is that I do. And certainly, I want to care about what I hope I can do. I really want to learn how to do it. I don’t think I have the tools in my toolbox that I might need to sustain any kind of career. I want to try and do the things that are going to help me have a slower burn and have a career that, maybe when I’m older, I’ll still be able to do it. And so that meant moving to New York, it meant doing plays.”