You Know You're Paul Rudd When...

…you're an Oord-trained actor who tells boner jokes for a living, the secret of your success is your everlasting obsession with Steve Martin, and you raised a son who thinks he's Elvis Costello. Chris Heath looks for the grownup side of Hollywood's most likable leading bro and comes up laughing

Confront the actor Paul Rudd with the observation that, in almost all circumstances, he seems to convey an immense likability and he replies, "Well, that's nice, thanks." He says this not in an obviously sarcastic way, but more in the manner of a man who has just been handed a slice of cake and is politely grateful for the gift, though not yet sure how hungry he is. But ask him whether this likability has ever seemed to be a hindrance professionally and he will concede that it has. "You know, there were times, probably in my twenties, when I would find it a little annoying. I would always get described as, you know, 'allAmerican,' 'has no edge,' nothing dangerous about me at all." A laugh, genial. "And I knew that was the case. I wasn't dangerous or brooding. Or in emotional turmoil. Any of that, really. And so I think at times I felt frustrated." When it comes to audiences, too, who have their own unfair and perverse instincts, this kind of likability can be a blessing that cloaks a curse within it. There is a kind of actor everyone will be glad to discover is in a movie they are seeing, but few will cross the street to see in a movie, and for a long while it seemed as though Paul Rudd might be one of these.

No longer. "Careerwise," as he observes, "things are very good for me in a way that they have never been before." His recent series of notable supporting parts now seem as though they were designed to build up to his satisfying prominence in last year's Role Models and the current I Love You, Man. Maybe it's just chance, or the fortune of being in the right place to ride the latest comedy wave. Maybe it's that audiences see something new behind his eyes, something that wasn't there before. ("As I've lived longer now, experienced more things, some of the optimism and wideeyed stuff, it just gets beaten out of you," he reflects. "It just does.") Or maybe it's that the likable will inherit the earth eventually, but they need to be very patient.

We meet in his chosen Manhattan diner, not far from where he lives with his wife, son, and a view of the Hudson. He was born a few miles from here, across the George Washington Bridge in Passaic, New Jersey, and his early childhood memories are of New York and New Jersey. "My grandparents lived in every Sopranos location," he says. But it is Kansas he usually refers to when asked where he is from. His parents moved there when he was 10. (His father was a sales manager for TWA, and the airline's hub was Kansas City.) "It's strange," he says, "because none of us really fit the stereotypical Kansan, midwestern persona—kind of the Bible Belt, happy, Christian, really whitebread…"

His parents were nonreligious European Jewish liberals. "It seemed a weird match," he says, "but there is something I really, really loved about growing up there, and something I love about going back. I think the people do seem genuinely happier. They seem nicer."

Why do you think that is

"I think there's something kind of good about growing up in a place you know is not the cool place to be. I think it's good for your head."

Both his parents were born in England—they'd known each other all their lives—and Rudd feels a vestigial connection to that country. "Even from my earliest memories," he says, "of the candy, really. And tea. And that counts for something when you're a kid." As a student, he went to England for a semester to study Jacobean drama at Oord. "I loved that. I associate a lot of happiness with spending time over there and working on scenes or plays that were very English."

He talks a little more about Jacobean drama and then starts laughing. I ask why it's funny. "I don't know," he says. "I think it's because I like that, and then, on the other hand, I'm making a living telling boner jokes."

There's an obvious mistake to make here—to take this as a sign of deep torment in Paul Rudd's soul: a man forced to sully a pure spirit and a higher calling in pursuit of the cheap laughs and large paychecks that come to those who can find a witty, contemporary way to speak of erectile tissue and its associated predicaments and adventures. Probably closer to the truth is to suggest that, as a man with wide tastes and other strings to his bow, Paul Rudd tells all the boner jokes he tells not because he needs to but because he wants to. And also that maybe Jacobean drama—the play Rudd conveniently chooses to mention is 'Tis Pity She's a Whore—isn't so different, anyway. If the grandest, noblest themes endure through human history and drama, then so, too, do the other ones. "Maybe in their own way," he suggests, "a lot of the Jacobean playwrights were making boner jokes and fart jokes."

They were the Judd Apatows of their day

"Absolutely," he says. He seems satisfied by the idea and sound of this, at the very least. "They absolutely were."

Many of the stories Paul Rudd tells of his youth relate to the pop music of earlier days and often reflect choices and tastes that are both peculiar and particular. One of his first memories is of standing on his bed wearing these shorts he thought were cool, with sideway zippers and hammer loops, no shirt, watching himself in the mirror, rocking out with his invisible guitar to his favorites at the time: "Monster Mash," Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights," the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night," and two by Neil Sedaka, "Calendar Girl" and "Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen."

Later he fell under the spell of the English pop star Adam Ant. "I really tried for a while to go with the Adam Ant look." He tried to put an Antinspired braid in his hair and asked his mother to shave back his scalp in imitation of Adam Ant's receding hairline, which to the young Paul Rudd was purely a matter of fashion and not a desperate attempt to disguise biological reality as New Romantic flourish. (She refused.) He also asked her to bleach the top of his hair blond in emulation of briefly celebrated synthpop wizard Howard Jones. (She refused.) And to aid in his creation of a Jonesesque rat tail in his hair. (She refused.)

"She wouldn't let me do anything," he says. "Smart."

Even Mother couldn't save him from every clothing calamity. "I had pants that had pleats in the ass," he recalls. "Pleated in front and then pleated in the back. They were already pegged at the bottom, but then I would try and have them taken in more. Until really it looked like I was wearing a huge pair of jodhpurs."

As he got older, his body started to work against him: "Puberty hit me pretty hard. All of a sudden I woke up and I had really curly hair." He tried to blowdry it straight, to no avail. "I wanted that Colt 45 featheredonthesides look. But I looked like Bruno from Fame. It was just a lost cause." He also had bad acne. "I didn't have, you know, a severe chronic case of pustules and things, but for years I had a pretty spotty face, and those are tough years, anyway. I was just kind of: Why Why did this have to happen And I also was not one to pop them, because I had been told that if you do that, another one will come back and another one, and it will scar your face. So I think I unnecessarily walked around with the odd pustule. I remember being at a football game and I had this swimming pool on my chin of pus, this goo, this massive zit—the bubble was ready to burst. I was horrified, just so embarrassed. But I also wanted to be out with everyone, so—this is probably a window into my personality—I made a huge deal of it. I was joking about it. Not trying to appear that it was bothering me so much. And there was a girl there that I really, really liked, and [another] girl said something like, 'You're just keeping that zit because you like Kelly and you just want all this attention.' And I remember going home and [mimes squeezing]. It was the first one I ever popped."

And how did it go with Kelly

"She was the first girl I ever kissed," he tells me. "So pretty damn good."

Though Rudd was also obsessed from an early age with comedy LPs, particularly Steve Martin's and Mel Brooks's, his first thought of a career was that he might be an artist. If not a painter, then maybe a graphic artist. After he went to speech class, and chanced upon one of those inspiring teachers who help you discover the possibilities within yourself, his priorities changed. He would act. As an adult, it amuses him when he listens to contestant after contestant on American Idol meander though the same insincere litany: I was born to sing.… I just want to share this with the world.… I love the craft.…

"It is simple," he says. "We're all looking for attention—that's what it is. Get real."

His youthful enthusiasms may have been the catalyst for his recent successes in a more direct, if obtuse, way. At a dinner party a few years back, Rudd was expressing his love of Steve Martin's character names—in particular, Gern Blanston. Someone at the dinner exclaimed that this explained Judd Apatow's strange email address; this was the name Apatow used. So Rudd—who had never met Apatow—sent him an email, and they started corresponding.

Rudd mentioned this story in the press a while back, and not long afterward he received a copy of Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up. Inside, Martin had signed his own name and then added, in parentheses, "Gern."

"It's one of the greatest things I've ever gotten in my life," says Rudd. "That was definitely one of those life moments."

When I ask Rudd why he believes his career has taken this good turn, he answers, "Just because I, in the last years, got into some comedies that made money, in particular Judd's movies, and I think it's been a great thing to be part of and I really lucked out."

It started with Anchorman, in which Rudd played one of Ron Burgundy's TVstation cronies. "Anchorman was never supposed to be a popular, like, hit movie," he says. "That movie was a cheap movie—it felt like we were working on a weird independent comedy in a way. 40YearOld Virgin was kind of the same. There was probably more expectation with Knocked Up. But I was just happy, honestly, to be working, and still am, on things that I like, that were fun to work on, with people I liked. And as for where I fit in on that kind of food chain, I never concerned myself with it, or cared. I want to enjoy the experiences, and that's become more and more important to me. I don't want to make Apocalypse Now. I think working on something that is miserable for eight months for the sake of art sounds just…miserable." He considers the reality of this assertion. "I don't know. I would probably do it, but I wouldn't enjoy it. And I also think some of the reasons people want to see comedies maybe is just because the world is going through a real tough time."

When I wonder aloud about what may be distinctive about this new generation of comedies, Rudd mentions the amount of onset improvisation and a distinctive use of popcultural references. And also that "a lot of the guys are not typically moviestar guys, you know." This is true, but it is also where Rudd is the odd one out in the gang. If the rest look like the kind of men who might not, in a world run according to the usual cruel and unreal laws of Hollywood, get the girl, then Rudd looks like a guy who probably would.

Another marker of these modern comedies (the Apatow kind, into which movies like Role Models and I Love You, Man seem to naturally fit, even though Judd Apatow has nothing to do with them) is the fresh way in which they seem to meld gross insensitivity and gross sensitivity. In I Love You, Man, a typically effective example of this new hybrid, what is remarkable is not just the ability to embrace both compelling softhearted emotion and longdistance projectile vomiting but its utter comfort in not feeling the need to indicate the difference.

It turns out that what makes Rudd most squeamish is unearned sentimentality. He points out that in Role Models, which he cowrote, after the first few scenes any halfawake viewer should have a pretty good idea of what will happen from then on, at least in a general sense, and of which heartstrings will be pulled along the way. "Nobody wants to make something very treacly. I think we're all very nervous of that. If the jokes are leftofcenter enough, if there's something subversive enough about it, then it makes it a little more tolerable. I know if I'm writing something, or if I'm acting in something, and it seems as though I'm going to deal with anything that might be kind of serious or emotional or vulnerable, it's not uncommon to pepper it with a few jokes. I really do think that that makes it more moving. Because that's how I would deal with my own insecurities and my own vulnerabilities. If something tragic happened in your life, you make the most offcolor joke about it. I do that kind of stuff. Absolutely." He laughs comfortably. "It's horrible stuff."

An example is requested. Rudd thinks for a short while, silent, and I can almost see experiences flit behind his forehead, one by one, each briefly considered then discarded as unshareable. Eventually, an example is offered: "Well, my dad died recently. And I was in a car with a couple of buddies, driving upstate. And I had this song on my iPod by this guy named David Geddes who did the song in the '70s called "The Last Game of the Season." It is one of these great storytelling songs from the '70s, where it's half talking, half singing. It would be the example of the one that is: We are going to set out to make you cry. But they haven't earned any of it, and it's ridiculous. And I love it."

He explains the story told in the song: "It's about this kid on a high school football team that doesn't ever play. And there's always a blind man in the bleachers that cheers on the team. Finally, it's the last game of the season. Nobody has even noticed that the blind man is not there. And it's halftime and nobody even notices that the kid's gone over to make a phone call. The team is getting killed, the hits are so hard, players are going down injured left and right. And the coach is, where is that kid And he comes running out, and the coach screams, 'Where the hell have you been' And he insists, 'You've got to put me in, Coach.' He goes in and just kicks ass. And they win. And the coach says, 'Where did you learn to play like that' And the kid says, 'Well, my father, he's blind, you see, and I just found out at halftime he passed away. And it's the first time that my father saw me play.' "

That's the song he's playing in the car with his friends. And Rudd's just loving it, but one of his buddies isn't so happy. Because his father actually is blind.

"And I said," Rudd recounts with pride, " 'Well, my dad's dead, so I win.' And I started teasing him that his father was only blind."

At this, I openly gawp.

"That's the kind of stuff that always makes me laugh," he says. "That's the way, of course, I deal with any of that tragic stuff."

When you say something like that, what do you feel like it's doing

"Well, I imagine my father cracking up at that."

He would have found that funny

"Oh yeah. He would have loved that shit. The further you go… And so I suppose it makes me feel close to him. But it also genuinely makes me laugh. And that's a minor example. I'm sure I could come up with things that are ten times worse."

Somewhere within these last sentences, Paul Rudd begins to cry. He leans hard to his right—almost as though, at a lower altitude, his tears will seem less evident. "I'm feeling very Barbara Walters right now," he says. I ask whether he wants to continue. "No, it's fine. It's fine. Absolutely." He sits up, wipes. "He was just really funny."

This morning, Paul Rudd woke at around a quarter to seven, and he and his son, Jack, did one of their favorite things to do together. They watched footage from Live Aid, the charity concert that froze in time 1985 pop music's present and past. Today they watched short sets by the Style Council, the Boomtown Rats, and Ultravox. "He loves Live Aid," says Rudd. Jack likes to play the guitar or drum along. Sometimes they'll build blocks. (Jack is 4.)

Pop music also guides his wardrobe.

"He only wears coats and ties," says Rudd. "He likes to wear suits, my son. And I think it was because of Elvis Costello."

He puts on a tie every day

"Yeah. And bow ties, lately. Loves them. And also dress shoes, not tennis shoes. And glasses. He looks like George F. Will."

When Rudd was 24 and just about to make Clueless, the movie that would be his first big break, a friend named Justin was driving in Los Angeles when a truck coming the other way crossed over and hit him headon. They had been doing a play together at the time, about Byron and Shelley. Justin was 22. The death affected Rudd badly.

"And it was weird," he says, "because he wasn't that great a friend of mine, but it hit me." Maybe the play itself didn't help. "You know, Shelley and Byron were haunted by ghosts," he says. "It all seemed to kind of coalesce, this moment in my life, where it really made me question everything and really start trying to figure out things that…I suppose…are unfigureoutable." He started reading a lot of spiritual books: The Prophet; Siddhartha; Many Lives, Many Masters, "a lot of that kind of stuff," he says. "Some of it makes me chuckle now." It felt useful then. "Certain things were comforting. I think it did help me at the time." He began to wonder whether he and Justin were friends in a previous life.

At home in L.A., he started doing these drawings filled with obscenities on a huge sheet of cardboard on his wall. "That was one of the harder moments I had experienced up until that point. And so, you know, when you're a young actor and you experience this kind of stuff…," he says, chuckling, "you have to put it into a big cardboard thing on your wall. It probably seemed the artistic thing to do." He was also upset at the time by the dreadful television show he was on, Wild Oats. "So I was kind of like, 'Fuck this town,' 'Fuck this.…' It was stupid. It wasn't a cry for help. It wasn't anything other than maybe somebody might come over and think, 'That's really interesting.' I'm sure that's what it was. Not to negate the feelings I had while I was making it. And that being said, when my parents came to visit and my mother saw that, I think she was very concerned and wanted me to come back home for a little while."

Around then, Los Angeles seemed to turn on him. One evening during the Clueless shoot, he was mugged. He had gone for dinner with a friend at Jerry's Deli in the Valley. Back out at his car, a guy grabbed him and told him to give him his money.

"This is a real gun," he told Rudd. "Watch out, because I'll fucking kill you."

Rudd assured him that he believed him and that it was fine.

"You don't think it's a real gun" the guy said, and fired it. The bullet went through Rudd's hair.

Rudd told him he had no cash but that he could take whatever he wanted. He offered his backpack and the gunman ran off.

"I just remember the sound of it," he says, recalling the bullet. "I remember people in the parking lot being really freaked out. But I just got very calm. Then I had to go to work the next day. It was a scene at a club. I was dancing. And I had just been shot at the night before."

He also got into a series of car accidents. His car was messed up in a hitandrun while it was parked. He borrowed a friend's car, and the next week, when he braked coming down a hill, it hydroplaned and hit another car. So he rented a car and was awakened one morning by a crash—someone had hit the rental car. He began to wonder whether it was time to get out of town. He had been thinking of moving to New York for some time, but he was waiting for the right moment. Then he went to a theater audition, and one of the monologues he had prepared was from Amadeus, and while walking down the street trying to memorize the lines, he bumped into someone. Improbably, it was Tom Hulce, who in the movie had played the very part he was rehearsing and was one of the actors Rudd most admired. He didn't know Hulce, but he told him what he was doing, and for some reason Hulce asked, "You live in New York" Rudd told him that he was living in California but thinking about moving.

"You should," he told him. "You'd like it."

That decided it. "I didn't need any more signs," Rudd says. After the audition, he called his landlord and said he was moving.

"And I did, and I've been here since."

Paul Rudd wasn't always America's most likable actor. In Kansas he worked for a while glazing hams at the Holiday Ham Company. In Los Angeles he worked at a Bennigan's and as a bar mitzvah and birthday DJ for a company called You Should Be Dancing: "Kind of like The Wedding Singer, but way down. I had long hair and people had to wear tudos, but I was still trying to develop my own look, and I had shorts and Doc Martens and kind of wanted to go for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk kind of phase."

After Rudd's father left TWA, he ran historical tours, leading parties to sites across Europe. He had two areas of particular interest. One was the Second World War. (Whenever Rudd or his school friends had a school paper on Churchill, they would seek out his father.) The other was the Titanic. Way before the wreck was discovered—way, way before Leonardo DiCaprio spread his arms—Rudd's father was a member of the Titanic Historical Society, and the basement was full of Titanic stuff: When Rudd auditioned for the DiCaprio role—"That was the one part I really, really wanted, for my dad"—he thinks he started talking about the shipbuilders, Harland & Wolff. ("Nobody was impressed.")

Rudd says that, in later years, his father took some of his greatest pleasure from expressing his disapproval. "We lived in a town called Lenexa, Kansas, and my friends, we gave him the name the Angry Lenexan. He was a big letter writer. He would write to papers and just give his opinion. They were always brilliant letters. Pointing out the hypocrisy and how pathetic it is. Animal rights…and stemcell research… When he was diagnosed with cancer, he wrote a thing about how dare these people get in the way of so many people getting help because of their misunderstood religious fervor. He would send me copies, and he always signed them 'The Angry Lenexan.' "

The scene in Role Models in which Rudd's character borrows Rudd's own indignation at preposterous coffeechain beverage naming is very much his father's legacy. There is another scene—cut, but on the DVD extras—where Rudd's character is sitting around with a group of kids in a circle, supposedly so they can express things they love, and he says: "I love it when hunters shoot each other."

"That's me, and it's definitely my father," he says. "When people like Dick Cheney have gay children—that's just all funny."

Rudd recently hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time. It was not long after his father's death. His father had known this was coming up and had been excited about it, but he hadn't made it. At the very end of the show, as the credits roll, Rudd, who is standing between Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, breaks from the crowd of mutual congratulation, grabs with both hands the front of the shirt he is wearing—his father's shirt from the navy—and then looks upward and blows a kiss.

Rudd's conversation is littered with popmusic references. To be specific, while sitting in the diner today, he will introduce into the conversation the following artists, in order: the Style Council, the Boomtown Rats, Ultravox, Adam Ant, Nik Kershaw, Depeche Mode, Blancmange, Yaz, Alphaville, Aswad, the Adventures, Howard Jones, Limahl, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Seals & Croft, John Mellencamp, Squeeze, Boston, David Geddes, Neil Sedaka, Glen Campbell, the Bay City Rollers, Spandau Ballet, Visage, Fad Gadget, Feargal Sharkey, Erasure, Frank Zappa, Fiat Lux, Duran Duran, Ron Sexsmith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wang Chung, Huang Chung, Go West, R.E.M., the Pogues, Hipsway, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Level 42, Haircut 100, Nick Heyward, Split Enz, Hunters & Collectors, Midnight Oil, the Hoodoo Gurus, the Proclaimers, Roman Holliday, the JoBors, Will Oldham, the Decemberists, Fleet Fos, the Divine Comedy, the Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, Lambchop, Animal Collective, Television, James Taylor, Elton John, XTC, Sade, Status Quo, Marillion, Camper Van Beethoven, U2, Black, and the Housemartins.

GQ correspondent Chris Heath wrote about Russell Brand in the February 2009 issue.