Paul Rudd says Hollywood pushed him to be “clean-cut” early on, even as he quietly wrestled with being more than the all-American, always-light comedy persona. Now, with his new film “Power Ballad” arriving June 5, he speaks more plainly about the depression h
By the time Paul Rudd arrived at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the early ’90s, he’d already ditched his mother’s gold lamé pants—but he still had a mop of hair plunging down his back. Even his clothes didn’t scream “everyman.” His ambition was more specific, too: “Serious acting.”
What followed wasn’t just a career path. It was a tug-of-war between the actor he felt he was becoming and the one Hollywood kept trying to polish.
During his graduation stretch, Rudd was invited to sit down with a Hollywood agent. He remembers being blindsided by what she told him he needed. “She says, ‘You’re going to need to cut your hair,’ ” he recalls. He says he was incredulous at the time. “Well. you’re not an edgy guy. you’re more of an all-American type. and they’re going to want you clean-cut. ” the agent told him. Rudd’s reaction was immediate and furious in tone—“Oh my God, that is not who I am. That’s the last thing I want to hear.”.
Decades later, at 57, Rudd says he’s come to terms with who Hollywood wants him to be. In fact, he’s built a long and successful career being that guy. It’s the playful. goofy good-guy charisma that fueled three decades’ worth of rom-coms like Clueless. R-rated comedies like I Love You. Man. and a lengthy run in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He’s also spent years slipping in darker notes—onstage especially—whenever he can.
Rudd’s next project, Power Ballad, arrives June 5. It’s from Sing Street’s John Carney. The film stars Rudd opposite Nick Jonas as an aging musician who never got the rock-star life his younger self dreamed of. Instead. the character met his wife. had a child. and settled into his role as lead singer of The Bride & Groove—“Ireland’s grooviest wedding band. ” according to the decal on their van. Rudd took the role in part because he identified with the wistful character.
“I mean, I don’t think I’m completely like what people might think I’m like. I’m not just a happy-go-lucky dude,” he says, then grows quiet.
When pressed for more, he offers a piece of himself he doesn’t usually put on the record. “Well, I can get pretty depressed,” he says, tentative at first. He describes the kinds of nights people rarely see—the moment when you wake up at 3 in the morning and your mind starts racing. the noise of the world folding into your life. and the question that lands hard: “How am I going to get on with all of this?” He says he feels that too. “I just don’t ever talk about that in interviews.”.
Rudd’s admission lands differently because of where the story places him. On this early May afternoon, he’s meeting at a diner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He’s just returned from a few days without his phone, which he says was purely accidental, but still felt liberating.
When he arrives, he’s not “Movie Star Paul Rudd” here. Even the maître d’ conversation turns into a joke about ordinary life. The man asks him which seat he’d prefer, and Rudd laughs—“Oh, Paul sits anywhere.” The implication is subtle, but the point is clear.
He also says he ditched L.A. for the kind of regular-guy existence New York can offer right after making Clueless during the mid-’90s. His own reps. he says. thought it was an “astonishingly stupid career move.” By the time Clueless captured the zeitgeist and minted him as a thinking-girl’s heartthrob in the summer of 1995. Rudd had already turned his attention to a stage production of The Last Night of Ballyhoo. That meant he was 3,000 miles away from Hollywood and unavailable. “My agent was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ” he says. But he was 25 or 26, excited about the chance to be on Broadway.
He says it wasn’t even the first time he left people baffled by his choices. Earlier. he landed a recurring role on the popular drama series Sisters. then bailed to study classic English drama at Oxford. “It was my first real acting job, and my agent thought I was insane for leaving then, too,” Rudd says. He describes the disbelief around him: “Honestly. everyone was like. ‘You’ve actually got a job. and now you’re going to go back to school to learn to do something to hopefully get a job?’ ” But his focus. he says. was on developing the skills he’d need for a long career.
He talks about looking through the lens of what specific musicians or performers might find interesting—“Is this something Tom Waits would find cool? Is this something Elvis Costello would do?”—and admits that lens gets “cloudier” as success arrives and time passes.
That’s one reason theater mattered to him: it felt far away from the movie industry and closer to what he loved. He says people took him more seriously in those spaces. And it freed him from the pressure to play “the everyman” all the time.
Even his pivot points show how carefully he tried to avoid being trapped by one image. He says he was terrified of landing something “visible. ” something that might pigeonhole him and make him famous before he felt he had enough experience to sustain a career. He spent his early ’90s run on the Fox sitcom Wild Oats scared it would become a hit. He calls back the outcome: it lasted only four episodes.
Through it all, Rudd keeps circling back to the same contradiction: the desire to be liked and accepted versus the need to be taken seriously.
For years. he says. the lock screen on his phone was the 20th Century Fox logo with the swirling spotlight and. in place of the studio name. three words: “No One Cares.” It was a reminder not to take the movie industry too seriously. “Ninety-nine percent of the world doesn’t give a fuck about the movie industry anyway,” he says. “They don’t even see these things.”.
But that wasn’t the full story.
Rudd says acceptance has been something he chased since early life. starting when his younger sister was born—when he felt himself competing for attention from his ad industry mom and airline executive dad. “I realized if I could do a little dance or something. they’d say. ‘Oh. look at our kid!’ and I liked that. ” he says. “And that’s what I’m still doing.”.
He describes humor as the quickest route to acceptance when he was the new kid in Kansas City, Kansas, and arguably the only one in class with British-born Jewish parents. Humor followed him into acting school and then into the version of him that people came to recognize.
But even that version didn’t arrive because he fought for it. When Clueless made him a heartthrob, Rudd says he wasn’t pushing for the role that would make him that. He was more interested in playing Christian. Cher’s clearly gay love interest. or Dionne’s boyfriend. Murray—though he says he hadn’t realized Murray was written as a Black character. He remembers reading the script and thinking. “Wait a minute. this is a gay character. who’s also the coolest character in the movie?. I’ve never seen this before and it’s the most interesting part.” The director Amy Heckerling let him read for those roles and for Josh. the role he landed.
He also says he didn’t chase validation after auditions. “But after the audition was done,” he says, “I was not on the phone with my agents, like, ‘Did I get it? Did I get it?’ ”
Rudd’s career, instead, keeps looking like a series of doors that opened—then doors he leaned into before anyone could fully lock him into a single shape.
Even Marvel, a franchise that could have turned him into a permanent brand, started as something he found absurd. He still says it’s strange to be cast as Ant-Man. calling himself “an avatar for averageness.” Marvel boss Kevin Feige insists the casting fit what Ant-Man needed. “We needed this guy to be a criminal but also someone that you’re rooting for no matter what. and that’s Paul. ” Feige said. “He’s also funny and good-looking and unbelievably charismatic.”.
Rudd says he didn’t sign on just because it was Marvel. “For me, it was the Edgar [Wright] angle,” he says. He was excited because the British filmmaker was attached to direct the film. He notes that changed before pre-production. but the feeling remained: Shaun of the Dead’s director wanting him felt like “my lane.”.
He says he stayed on rather than drop out with Wright. and that he recruited Anchorman director Adam McKay to help with a script pass. His hope. he says. was that if Ant-Man worked and people saw it. it might help him finance “interesting. smaller things” afterward and give him “a little more control over what comes after it.”.
He also talks about the physical cost. For the first time in his life, he had to “get into Marvel shape,” which meant cutting out anything enjoyable diet-wise and doing a punishing exercise regimen.
As the franchise pulled him further in, the scale surprised him. His first Ant-Man led to two more stand-alone films and three Avengers movies. including the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday. where Feige says he plays “more of an elder statesman now. dealing with other newer characters.” He also notes that Ant-Man even has its own theme park attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland. and that he was there alongside Feige for its opening.
Still, he says he used Marvel momentum to keep other work moving. He mentions big studio franchise swings including a pair of Ghostbuster films. and adds that “Life is sometimes just collecting experiences.” He points to smaller projects as well: A24 films including Friendship and Death of a Unicorn. and Mute. a Duncan Jones sci-fi drama he did largely because he finally got to play a deeply menacing character.
And even when he admits the trade-offs, he resists complaining.
For someone who works as much as Rudd does. he says. he’s content not working when the schedule allows it. At the diner, he has coffee in front of him—his third cup in as many hours. He says he’ll pay for the caffeine later. but right now he’s between projects and has nowhere to be. “The height of joy for me is having everyone I love under the same roof. maybe taking a walk around this amazing city. and then getting into bed at 8 or 9 at night and watching Antiques Roadshow with my wife. ” he says.
He laughs while saying people don’t think he ages. “I mean, my God, people don’t think I age? Listen to me.”
His family life has changed, too. His kids are grown: his daughter, Darby, is 16, and his son, Jack, is 21. He says he’s planning to do another play—his first in more than a decade. He stopped when life got busy. and his kids took issue with his absences. down to a heartbreaking look on Darby’s face when she asked. “Daddy. do you really have to go back to the theater again tonight?” Now. he says. she’d shrug. “I don’t give a fuck. I’ve got homework.”.
Before any play, though, comes Power Ballad—and Rudd says selling it is harder than making it. The selling part feels “inauthentic” to him. “I really just want to be a respected actor,” he says. “I want people to think that I’m good. I want to be in things that people think are cool. I want to be the kind of actor that were always my favorite actors growing up.”.
He gets asked whether he feels he’s achieved that. He pauses. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t dwell on it.”
John Carney, he says, noticed something during production: that Rudd doesn’t view himself as a big movie star. “He considers himself a jobbing actor who just happens to have that face,” Carney says. Carney adds that only after Rudd signed on did other actors become interested. the money get released. and the Irish Film Board come on board.
Rudd also shares a quieter thought about the gap between the future you imagine and the self you end up being. Carney reflects that there’s “a version of each of us out there that didn’t quite work out the way the weird, policing 20-year-old version of ourselves thought.”
Even with the laughter, and even with all the roles that let him play lighter colors, Rudd keeps returning to the same point: he’s not only the smiling persona. He says he does get depressed. He says he just doesn’t talk about it.
In Power Ballad, the tone is hopeful without pretending life is simple. Rudd says he wants that kind of emotional ride. and that he’s seeking it more now than ever because of what he calls “the crushing weight of everything else that is so overwhelmingly shitty.” He says he wants to feel hopeful. to laugh. and “to not be serious about certain things.”.
Then he stops himself. He smiles.
For a man who spent years being read as the guy you think he is, the most noticeable thing about his new candor isn’t the sadness. It’s the carefulness—how he’s learned what Hollywood wants, what people see, and what he still tries to keep for himself until the moment feels right.
Paul Rudd Power Ballad John Carney Nick Jonas Ant-Man Marvel Cinematic Universe Clueless depression theater Broadway Hollywood typecasting