The movie Paul Rudd begged to have his name taken off: “I was really freaked out”
Just like every other actor who dreams of making it big in Hollywood, Paul Rudd has made a few movies that he looks back on with varying degrees of regret, but there’s only one that he disavowed so much that he ended up being credited under an alias.
The industry’s ultimate ageless wonder’s breakthrough came more than 30 years ago in Amy Heckerling’s teen cult classic, Clueless, which was also his feature debut. However, it wasn’t his first acting job, and trying to get his foot in the door led to some decisions that he’d rather pretend never happened.
It wasn’t as if Rudd became a big-screen mainstay in the immediate aftermath of playing Josh Lucas, either, even if his next two roles were in a Halloween sequel and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which is a decent hattrick to kick off his movie credentials.
For example, does anyone remember that he played a villain in the 2000 Hong Kong sci-fi action flick, Gen-Y Cops? If you do, then you’re a true superfan. Similarly, even though his co-star was Reese Witherspoon, their road-tripping comedy, Overnight Delivery, where they were cast as a college student and a stripper, respectively, isn’t one that lingers in the memory.
Before he’d appeared in a film, and before he’d even appeared in a single episode of a TV show, Rudd would take anything that was offered his way. As a result, in 1992, he popped up in the most unlikely of places: a Christian film called A Question of Ethics, a short-form drama about a high school swimmer who finds their college scholarship under threat due to their failing grades in science.
“It wasn’t even a movie,” he clarified. “It was a 20-minute thing for kids about cheating in school.” Still, a job was a job, or so he thought. “On the last day, we did the big redemption scene where my character comes to his senses,” Rudd explained. “And the director came over, and he was like, ‘That was great, we just want to do an alternate take.'”
Unfortunately, that alternate take was “all about being saved, and how I came to my senses because I accepted Jesus into my life, and if I hadn’t, I was going to hell.” When he discovered the heavy religious angle, it didn’t sit too well with the actor, for two very important reasons.
“I was really freaked out, and I didn’t want to do it,” he added. “I said, ‘One, I don’t really believe in this, and two, I’m Jewish.'” He thought it had been forgotten, but when one of his sister’s friends saw it on a random Christian TV channel one day, they asked if it had really been him. Doing her sibling a solid, Rudd’s sister said that it wasn’t him, but someone who looks very similar, called Kenny Chin.
Why was he credited as Kenny Chin? Because that was the name of a ceramic clown that he and his friends stole from a golf course during their college days, obviously. So remember, if you ever randomly stumble across A Question of Ethics one day, you’re not watching Paul Rudd, you’re watching Kenny Chin.
