He was a clued-in guy in Clueless, an in-the-background boyfriend in Friends and a put-upon husband in Knocked Up. Now late-rising star Paul Rudd takes the lead in a "bromantic comedy". What's that? asks MICHAEL DWYER
IT'S TAKEN a very long time for anyone to devise a movie addressing a man's search for adult male friendship as its primary theme. That time has finally come with I Love You, Man, featuring Paul Rudd as an estate agent seeking someone to be the best man at his imminent wedding.
“When I read the script, I was surprised when it struck me that this hadn’t been done before,” Rudd says. “I couldn’t think of a single other movie. There have been buddy comedies, but they’re different. This one follows the trajectory of a romantic comedy and has all the same beats, but it’s not a parody of a romantic comedy. It just talks about platonic male love. I thought it was clever.”
It is, and it’s the first movie to be tagged as “bromantic.” “I don’t think that phrase was around until a few months ago,” Rudd laughs. “When we were making the movie, we talked about calling it a bromantic comedy. We thought we were so smart to coin that phrase, but it probably was already out there in the ether. Now it’s everywhere and people are talking about bromance and man-dates, and even manpanions.”
Rudd, who turned 40 last week, is such genial and engaging company that he would seem the perfect manpanion for just about any guy, but the movie depicts his character, Peter, as insecure in the company of men and much more at ease with women.
“One of the really appealing things about Peter is this goodness and heart-on-his-sleeve honesty he has,” Rudd says. “He’s not afraid to show his emotions. They’re qualities you don’t see all that much in a movie. He’s self-aware enough to know he can be so lame but can’t help it.
“People can relate to that. I know I do when I get in those modes where I wish I could shut up, where everything I say sounds stupid. So why don’t I just not talk?”
Peter unexpectedly finds the ideal manpanion in a brash hedonist, Sydney, played by Jason Segel, who is on his third movie with Rudd after Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
"There's an Odd Couplequality in there for sure," says Rudd. "There's some of that with Jason and me inherently, but we're probably not so extreme in our differences. We like playing off each other. We find a lot of the same stuff funny and we enjoy each other's company. We trust one another, so it's nice to know that I can bobble the ball and he'll just take it and go with it."
Some of the movie’s most amusingly ridiculous humour involves Peter and Sydney mangling words and phrases in a self-conscious attempt to get closer through an invented private language.
“We wanted to talk in that casual way that dudes can talk,” says Rudd. “When I was in college, I had friends like that and these phrases we had became part of the vernacular for the entire group. It isn’t natural, and it’s quite sad at times.”
In another of the movie’s running jokes, every time Peter tries another accent, whether Scottish or Jamaican, he gets accused of sounding like a leprechaun.
“That started on the second or third day of shooting,” Rudd says. “We were just goofing around and I started doing those bad accents and John Hamburg, the director, said I sounded like a leprechaun. John kept that going throughout the shoot, never really knowing if we would use it.”
Rudd loves visiting Ireland, to the point of building an Irish bar at his home in New York. “It’s so weird that you would know that, but it’s true,” he says. “The bar is about two weeks away from launch. I have Guinness on tap at my house and when I was last in Dublin, I went to their brewery and they gave me some stuff for my bar.”
I Love You, Mantaps into rock music as a bonding source between men, in particular through Peter and Sydney's shared passion for Rush, who perform in the film.
“I met Geddy Lee, who sings with Rush,” says Rudd. “I was very nervous they would regret saying yes to it and would feel we were taking the piss out of them, which we definitely weren’t. I was explaining the scene to Geddy Lee and that Jason and I would be having a blast and bouncing all over each other because our characters love the band, but Rashida Jones, who plays my fiancée, would be just standing there and looking bored – not because she doesn’t like the music but because she’s shut out of our total guys thing. Geddy Lee said, ‘Okay, so it will be just like every one of our concerts’.”
Rudd used to associate Rush with “the dangerous kids” when he was a schoolboy in Kansas.
"It seemed like the type of music that anyone who beat me up at school would listen to. And Geddy Lee had a scary imposing figure. He had this hair that came down over his face. Then, as I got older, I thought Tom Sawyerwas kind of a cool song and I got their Moving Pictures CD, although Rush were prog-rock and I was much more into the synth-pop sound and the new romantics of the 1980s. But I was really excited that Rush were doing the movie and that I knew enough of their songs."
Wasn't it much more hip when Rudd played a Radiohead fan in the exuberant Jane Austen updating that was Cluelessback in 1996?
“You know, most people weren’t into Radiohead at that stage,” he says. “I was so happy they were going to be part of the soundtrack. I saw them playing in a bar back when they used to play in bars. That was great.”
Clueless marked the movie breakthrough for Rudd after his inauspicious screen debut in the formulaic horror sequel, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. His most interesting early roles were largely in theatre, which he studied at the University of Kansas. He got to know a fellow student, Neil LaBute, and later acted in his provocative play, Bash, and in the stage and film productions of LaBute's The Shape of Things.
“I loved Bash as a play,” he says. “I did it in New York and in LA and I’d love to have done it in Dublin when Neil directed it there, but I couldn’t do it at the time.”
The last time Paul Rudd and I shared the same space was in the summer of 1998 at the Lincoln Centre in New York, where he was in a thong as the lovesick Orsino, Duke of Illyria in Nicholas Hytner's vibrant, sensual production of Twelfth Nightwith Helen Hunt as Viola, Kyra Sedgwick as Olivia and Philip Bosco as Malvolio. The gorgeous set by Irish production designer Bob Crowley featured a swimming pool on the stage.
“Bob is the best in the business,” Rudd says. “It was the most beautiful set I’ve ever seen. They had incense coming in through the vents. When you walked into the theatre, you could smell it right away. We were lounging around on stage for about 20 minutes before the show even began, so people really felt like they were in Illyria.”
Rudd acted in another radical Shakespearean treatment two years earlier when Baz Luhrmann cast him as Dave Paris in his exhilarating screen reworking of Romeo and Juliet. "I loved Strictly Ballroom,"he says, "and Baz Luhrmann is a real visionary, so I desperately wanted to work with him and to prove myself."
Earlier this decade, Rudd played a recurring role over 18 episodes of Friends as Phoebe's husband, Mike Hannigan. He had co-starred with Jennifer Aniston in The Object of My Affection, the bittersweet serious comedy in which she falls in love with his character, who is gay. Was it difficult to fit in with a close-knit group of actors who had been working together for so long?
“They were very welcoming,” he says. “I had worked with Jennifer and known her for many years, and I knew David Schwimmer. My approach to that show was the same on the screen as it was off, which was to hang in the background and not get in the way of anybody.”
Since Rudd featured in Anchormanfive years ago, he has been on a roll, demonstrating his range in the hit movie comedies The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Upand the recent Role Models, one of the biggest box office successes this year in Ireland.
Rudd is now set to co-star with Steve Carrel in Jay Roach's Dinner with Schmucks, the US remake of the French film Le Diner des Cons, arguably the ultimate comedy of embarrassment.
“Steve is playing the idiot and I’m playing the guy who finds him.” Rudd says. “It’s being re-written right now but the premise will remain the same. I can’t wait to do it.”
